Complementary therapies and healing practices: faculty/student beliefs and attitudes and the implications for nursing education

The purpose of this study was to describe the knowledge and attitudes of nursing faculty and students (BSN and MS) regarding complementary/alternative therapies (C/AT) and their integration into nursing practice. Implications for curricular and faculty development were also identified. A cross-sectional survey (n = 170) of graduating BSN students (n = 73) and MS and PhD students (n = 47) and faculty (n = 50) was conducted in a university-based nursing program. The self-administered questionnaire contained 134 forced choice items. Questions assessed attitudes and knowledge about training in, personal use of, perceived barriers to, and intent to integrate C/AT into clinical practice. Over 95 percent of the students and faculty agreed that clinical care should integrate the best of conventional and C/AT practices. Few had received formal C/AT education; the highest number had received some education about massage, music, prayer/spiritual healing, and therapeutic/healing touch. They desired more education but not necessarily the skills to perform these therapies themselves. Faculty and students expressed positive attitudes about incorporating C/AT into curricula and nursing practice. Current knowledge lags behind interest, however, suggesting a situation ripe for change. The most important perceived barrier to incorporation was lack of evidence. Curricular change is needed to fully integrate C/AT in nursing programs at all levels; faculty development and nursing research is needed to facilitate these changes.     

Nursing faculty and students' attitudes regarding HIV.

A multidisciplinary group of health professional educators examined the faculty and student attitudes related to AIDS in undergraduate and graduate nursing programs and in a dental hygiene program. Results indicated consistent differences in attitudes toward homosexuality and intravenous drug users, AIDS-phobia, AIDS-related work stress, and willingness to work with HIV, homosexual, or intravenous-drug-using patients among faculty, undergraduate, and graduate nursing students, and certificate-level dental hygiene students. Faculty and master's-level nursing students consistently indicated the most positive attitudes and behavioral intentions. A one-year follow-up of a sample of undergraduate students revealed little change in these attitudes or behavioral intentions. Implications of these findings for nursing educators are discussed.     

Collaborative student-faculty research to support PhD research education

This paper describes a three-semester hour applied research course taught over three semesters in a revamped PhD research curriculum at a Midwestern high research activity (R2) university-based nursing program. Faculty developed this strategy to help students become adequately prepared nurse scientists. Students and faculty engaged in a collaborative research project to provide students with opportunities to develop, integrate, and apply research knowledge, skills, and attitudes while concurrently advancing through the related research courses. A summary of these experiences and what was learned is organized within a knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSA) framework. The collaboration between faculty and student peers was essential to students' success in the course. Student and faculty perspectives were used to describe what was learned during the first year this course was taught, together with future recommendations.     

A discussion of concepts for promoting nursing core competencies

The nursing curriculum model has evolved from the previous "content-based approach" to an "outcomes-based approach." As such, nursing faculty should pay to particular attention to changes in the working environment that their graduates can be expected to face. This paper developed a competency-oriented curriculum framework to address school and profession objectives. Concept analysis was used to clarify the characteristics of each competency and related concepts. Then, nursing faculties identified outcomes and desired target levels in line with student learning needs. Finally, teaching strategies and learning activities for class and clinical practice were developed. Competencies are not nurtured separately. Nursing faculty should provide adequate learning opportunities for their students in order to help students integrate healthcare knowledge, skills and attitudes successfully. In addition, the nursing faculty is responsible to guide students to emphasize quality of care and examine the association of such with professional competencies. Accumulating clinical experience and reflection will assist students to develop integrity and life-long learning abilities and graduate with solid professional competencies.     

Introducing personal digital assistants to enhance nursing education in undergraduate and graduate nursing programs

This article describes how a school of nursing implemented an innovative program to introduce personal digital assistants to undergraduate and graduate nursing students. Undergraduate students studying pharmacology and nurse practitioner graduate students in an adult health course were asked to purchase a personal digital assistant privately or through the university bookstore. Faculty selected an appropriate software package. After students were oriented to the hardware and software package, innovative teaching strategies were implemented to help guide students to use their mobile devices to access clinically relevant information. Student feedback about this experience was positive. The most important elements for successful adoption of personal digital assistants are to provide training for both faculty and students, and to develop learning opportunities using the technology. Use of mobile technologies is an important competency that will improve the quality of nursing practice and therefore should be included in nursing curricula.     

Undergraduate nursing students' perceptions of substance use and misuse: a Brazilian position

Alcohol, cocaine and cannabis are the substances most commonly abused in Brazil. There is limited evidence on the perceptions of undergraduate nursing students towards substance misuse. Negative attitudes, in combination with the lack of appropriate knowledge and skills, may result in minimal care provided to substance misusers. The aims of the study are to examine the knowledge and attitudes of undergraduate nursing students towards substance misusers and consider the implications of these attitudes for nursing education. The Nurse Education in Alcohol and Drug Educational Faculty Survey (NEADA) questionnaire on knowledge and education, nursing interventions, attitudes and values was distributed to undergraduate nurses (n = 227) in the south and south-eastern part of Brazil. The findings showed that there is a lack of adequate education in drug and alcohol use and misuse, including competency skills, but the participants were positive about treatment interventions. A paradigm shift in nurse education curricula and further research studies on attitudes and values towards substance misuse should be on the educational agenda. These are challenges faced by nurses to meet the healthcare needs of substance misusers.     

We need to know more: nurse educators' interest and expertise in gerontology.

An assessment was made of 129 faculty who teach nursing students about the care of aged clients to determine their level of interest and expertise in 21 content areas related to gerontology. Faculty rated their expertise consistently lower than the relevance of, and their interest in, each of the content areas. Areas identified as most important for their professional growth tended to be areas where faculty ranked their expertise as already being high. The mean self-rated expertise of faculty who taught a course in gerontological nursing was significantly higher than those who did not. Most respondents lacked formal education in gerontology: 9% of respondents had gerontology in their undergraduate program; 27% in their graduate program. Only 4% were certified as gerontological nurses or gerontological nurse practitioners.     

Evidence for policy and regulation: a model to address development of unqualified faculty

Nurses often do not become faculty through deliberate intention; rather they enter the role because of circumstance. While they may be expert practitioners, they are often not prepared for faculty roles. Unlike traditional preparation for nursing practice, which requires clinical education, the role of nurse teacher often has no systematic preparation. The purpose of the Nurse Faculty Intern (NFI) Pilot Study was to investigate the role development of nurse educators and the mechanism by which graduate students gain competencies related to pedagogy through practical experience and a relationship with mentors. Results from the study revealed need for intentional role development for the NFI. Even though NFI's had many years of nursing experience, they expressed the need for orientation to teaching pedagogy to better use their nursing knowledge when working with students. This article will present the findings and recommendations from the study.     

Enhancing cancer nursing education through school of nursing partnerships: the Cancer Nursing Faculty Fellows Program

This article describes the Cancer Nursing Faculty Fellows Program, an innovative program designed to provide nurse educators with state-of-the-art cancer knowledge to enhance their ability to teach cancer content. The Faculty Fellows Program was developed at the University of Louisville School of Nursing and was part of a multifaceted educational intervention to improve cancer nursing education. This intervention included comprehensive curriculum reviews, conferences with national consultants, cancer-specific faculty seminars, and funded instructional projects. The Faculty Fellows Program consisted of a mentored experience attending the Oncology Nursing Society Congress and a month-long intensive program to provide faculty with exposure to cancer experts, researchers, and clinical and community resources. By providing a forum for nurse educators to obtain this knowledge and provide the resources they need to change the way they educate nursing students, the program can significantly affect cancer-related nursing education and, ultimately, the care of patients with cancer and survivors.     

Teaching and learning activities to educate nursing students for interprofessional collaboration: A scoping review

To prepare new graduates with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to engage in effective interprofessional collaboration (IPC) in practice, healthcare professional programmes need to ensure their curriculum provides opportunities for interprofessional education (IPE) and IPC. To strengthen IPE within an undergraduate curriculum and meet the professional requirements set out by regulatory bodies to prepare new graduate nurses to achieve IPC competencies, a curriculum initiative was developed to expand IPE across the four years of the Baccalaureate of Science in Nursing (BSN) programme. The purpose of this scoping review was to identify published teaching-learning activities in undergraduate nursing programmes to inform the development and integration of IPE curricula. The literature included was identified by searching the following electronic databases: EMBASE and EBSCO (CINAHL, Medline, Education Research Complete, ERIC). The search was limited to articles with abstracts published between 2008 and 2016 in the English language. All ten studies that met inclusion criteria reported students’ perceived interprofessional education as valuable in facilitating their achievement of IPC competencies. Interprofessional education is an approach for preparing nursing students with knowledge, skills, and attitudes to achieve IPC competencies and therefore, urgently needs to become more prevalent in nursing curricula. Educators can use a variety of IPE teaching-learning activities to support students’ achievement of IPC competencies in order to prepare new practitioners to engage in effective IPC in a variety of healthcare milieus. Nurse educators are encouraged to intentionally integrate learning opportunities into current and future undergraduate nursing education to prepare collaborative ready graduate nurses.     

Faculty positions as a career choice for professionals--Part I

This article is the first part of a two-part series designed to give the readers an overview of the study, "Faculty Positions as a Career Choice for Professionals." This nationwide study, requested by the AANA Education Committee, investigated the questions, "Why do professionals enter faculty positions?" and "Why do CRNAs with graduate degrees choose to become or choose not to become educators?" An attempt was made to answer these questions by studying demographic, life cycle and certain intrinsic and extrinsic factors of graduate-prepared CRNAs, nursing education faculty, higher education faculty (other than nursing and nurse anesthesia), and nursing service personnel. The authors reviewed the methodology and the results as they applied to the demographic data. The results showed that CRNA faculty were older than practicing CRNAs. Twenty-five percent of the CRNAs had degrees in nurse anesthesia, 16% in education, 13% in nursing, 6% in biology, and 40% in a variety of other disciplines. Sixty-five percent had undergraduate degrees in nursing and 7% in nurse anesthesia. CRNA faculty salaries and practicing CRNA salaries were comparable. The information was presented by the authors at the Assembly of School Faculty Meeting, February 21-24, 1991 in Tampa, Florida. It is hoped that this study will assist nurse anesthesia programs, universities and colleges in their recruitment activities for faculty.     

The Yapunyah project: embedding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives in the nursing curriculum

The Yapunyah Project is an initiative of the Faculty of Health at Queensland University of Technology. It was instigated to further improve the development of cultural competence in health graduates with respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives. The project was informed by the cultural competence in healthcare delivery models of Campinha-Bacote (1998a) and Cross, Bazron, Dennis and Isaacs (1989) and by the cultural safety reforms to nursing curricula in New Zealand. The Yapunyah Project involved extensive consultation and collaboration with Indigenous staff and health experts in the local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. A core curriculum, and associated graduate transcultural competencies, were informed by these discussions and earlier reforms in health curricula by the Committee of Deans of Australian Medical Schools and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. Although the overall project involved four separate schools within the faculty, this paper details the experience of embedding Indigenous perspectives within the undergraduate nursing curriculum. The experience has been a challenging and positive one, and the reforms have been supported by a sustainable framework. This paper outlines how one university faculty is endeavouring to educationally prepare nursing students to practice with evidence-based transcultural nursing knowledge based on culture care values, beliefs, and traditional lifeways of Indigenous people of Australia. As such, the project aims to contribute to the improvement and promotion of the health and well-being of Indigenous Australians in culturally and ethnohistorically meaningful ways.     

Improving knowledge and attitudes toward older adults through innovative educational strategies.

Our country's rapidly growing older adult population represents the core business of health care; however, few nurses are adequately prepared to care for their unique needs. This is caused, in part, by the limited attention paid by nursing educators to incorporating basic gerontological nursing principles into undergraduate programs. During the last 7 years, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, through the generous support of the John A. Hartford Foundation, has led several initiatives to improve gerontological nursing education in baccalaureate programs. This article describes innovative educational strategies successfully implemented by three nursing programs--New York University, Tuskegee University, and University of Rhode Island--to increase knowledge and improve attitudes of nursing students in caring for older adults. Successful strategies include a long-term care guide, a senior mentor experience, student assignments addressing diversity issues, student debates, critical reflective journalizing, and an evaluation tool for measuring student attitudes. These strategies are readily reproducible and assist faculty to easily integrate gerontological nursing content into the curriculum while simultaneously enhancing student attitudes and knowledge.     

Partners for NP education: the 1999 AANP preceptor and faculty survey

PURPOSE: To increase understanding of national trends in nurse practitioner (NP) clinical education, the Education Committee of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners (AANP) conducted a survey at the 1999 National AANP Conference in Atlanta. DATA SOURCES: A convenience sample of preceptors (n = 87) and faculty (n = 42) out of the total attendance of 1,744 responded to a written questionnaire. CONCLUSIONS: Preceptor respondents provided data concerning the number of NP students supervised, influence of student supervision on productivity, and availability of incentives for precepting. Faculty reported placement and supervision issues, the extent of precepting in their clinical practice site, and recognition and support for this role. Faculty and preceptors disagreed about the types and number of incentives offered for accepting students as well as the congruence of clinical teaching activities and national teaching guidelines. Precepting did not appear to strongly influence preceptor productivity. External funding did not influence opportunities for clinical education. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: In 1998, the graduates of NP programs rose by 15.8% and over half of all nursing students enrolled in graduate nursing programs were seeking a NP education. This increase in students may compromise the ability of schools of nursing to insure quality clinical education of NP students by increasing faculty workload and placing greater demands on expert preceptors in the community. Clinical education is also changing in light of changes in the health care system.     

The end-of-life nursing education consortium (ELNEC) experience

The End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) is a train-the-trainer educational program to help nursing faculty integrate care of the dying patient and the patient's family in the nursing curriculum. The authors describe the ELNEC experience, which prepares nurse educators to competently teach end-of-life care, and provides them with the necessary knowledge, skills, and resources to effectively integrate end-of-life content into existing nursing curricula.     

Incorporating geriatrics into baccalaureate nursing curricula: laying the groundwork with faculty development.

In June 2001, the John A. Hartford Foundation of New York awarded the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) a 3.99 million dollar grant to enhance gerontology curriculum development and new clinical experiences in 20 baccalaureate and 10 graduate schools of nursing. Over the 4-year grant implementation period, AACN learned a valuable lesson from the grant's site directors: Faculty development is the single most necessary precursor to the successful implementation and maintenance of geriatric curricular enhancements. Unless faculty members foster positive attitudes toward aging, expand their geriatric nursing knowledge base, and are able to integrate geriatric content into the curricula, progress cannot be made. Enhancing Geriatric Nursing Education project directors recommend that the following steps be taken toward the creation of successful faculty development activities: (1) anoint a champion to mentor and persuade faculty members to embrace gerontology; (2) garner faculty buy-in by engaging the faculty early so that they become active participants in the curricular change process; (3) assess faculty knowledge and comfort level by administering tools developed by the John A. Hartford Foundation Institute for Geriatric Nursing and by conducting surveys based on AACN geriatric core competencies; (4) conduct faculty development workshops that include cutting-edge knowledge and research and provide the faculty with opportunities to discuss feelings and stereotypes about aging; (5) elicit the dean's support to encourage and allow time and opportunities for training; and (6) use the many excellent resources that help the faculty integrate geriatric content into their courses. This article will further elucidate such strategies and will highlight the range of faculty development activities in which grant-funded schools engaged.     

Being an interviewer in a structured oral assessment process for selection of undergraduate nursing students: Motivations,expectations and reflections of the experience

There is a dearth of knowledge about individuals who interview candidates for nursing. Who are they and why do they volunteer to take part in an oral assessment process for selection of undergraduate nursing students? The aim of this study was to answer these questions, and to seek the perspectives of the assessors about the process. Academic staff of the Faculty of Health Sciences, staff members of the Discipline of Nursing and registered nurses working in affiliated hospitals nominated for roles as oral assessors. All assessors received training and no payment was made. Thirty‐nine of 45 (86.6%) oral assessors completed questionnaires on their experiences of being an assessor. The majority of assessors were female (69.2%) and from a clinical background (71.8% vs. 28.2% faculty‐based). The most commonly cited motivations included a desire to contribute to the development of the nursing profession (94.9% of responding); because they knew what was involved in a nursing career (79.5%); wanting to influence who becomes a nurse (76.9%); and because they understood the qualities needed to be a registered nurse (76.9%). Assessors spoke highly of the experience and in general found it enjoyable.     

Cognitive dissonance and undergraduate nursing students' knowledge of, and attitudes about, smoking

BACKGROUND: Smoking is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Although nurses have an important role in health promotion, and are well placed to see the harmful effects of tobacco smoking, studies suggest that they smoke at much the same rate as the general population. AIM: The aim of this paper is to report a study examining undergraduate nursing students' knowledge about the impact of smoking on health, and their attitudes towards smokers and smoking. METHODS: The study took place in 2001, using a non-probability sample of 366 undergraduate nursing students from an Australian university. Participants completed the Smoking and Health Promotion instrument. Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance provided an explanatory framework for the findings. RESULTS: Most respondents who were still smoking began the habit while in high school. Students had greater generic than specialized knowledge about the effects of smoking on health, and there was no significant difference between second and third year students' knowledge. Those who still smoked had less favourable attitudes towards smoking-related health promotion than those who had never smoked or stopped smoking. Non-smokers were more supportive of non-smokers' rights than those who continued to smoke, while those who had stopped smoking were undecided. There was minimal association between levels of knowledge and attitudes about being sensitive to smoking-related health risks. CONCLUSION: The findings have implications for both high school education and undergraduate nursing education, and for the recruitment of students to undergraduate nursing programmes. More attention needs to be given in undergraduate nursing programmes to smoking and smoking-related illnesses, and to nurses' role in smoking health promotion.