Abstract
The Essentials prepared by the AACN are a set of documents, the goal of which is to give an idea about the required curriculum and practices for practical training of nursing staff at all levels. In other words, the essentials are unified and standardized guidelines that define all theoretical and practical compliances that nursing staff needs to possess at all stages of training. Even though the theory and methods covered by the Essentials include the most relevant information and techniques, specific chapters of these guidelines need to be a subject of constant review. The paper is dedicated to the study of the Essentials and listing the possible methods to improve them.
Introduction
AACN is a structure that promotes a high quality of academic studies of the nursing staff on all levels – from Baccalaureate to Doctor studies, also featuring Nursing Practice programs. This body is responsible for the implementation of innovation in this area. The so-called Essentials prepared by the AACN are a set of documents, the aim of which is to provide an idea about the required curriculum. Among the others, these documents also cover the competencies, which the graduates of each level are supposed to achieve.
Master’s Essentials
This manual defines the core ideas of nursing education at the Master’s level. It is an updated version of the older document, which now includes the concepts improving the standards of the current nursing practices (Ferrell, & Virani, 2016). These nine core Essentials at the Master’s level, which include background practice, leadership, safety, scholarship, IT, health policy, collaborative measures, clinical prevention, and master’s nursing practice (Wang et al., 2018). All these underlying ideas complement each other and form a unique set of developmental aims towards building a strong and solid professional background.
The Essentials from one to five cover the fundamental skills and competencies needed for a nursing specialist, whereas Essentials six and seven supports and emphasizes the jurisdictional and legislative rights of master’s level nurses. The remaining Essentials analyses and summarizes a broad spectrum of issues related to population-level features alongside the details of nursing practice at the given level.
According to the author’s interpretation, each Essential point recognizes certain master’s related property of nursing practice (Wang et al., 2018). For instance, Essential four is designed to make necessary preparations for nurses to be able to handle research projects and work in professional team setups. In addition, Essential two enables nurses to be able to take on managerial roles and monitor nursing practices.
The Fundamentals of the Clinical Resources
This manual covers the core elements of the medical support of the whole range of nursing staff at all levels of academic training. Thus, it includes the spheres of research, graduate and undergraduate levels of education, and medical practice at the faculties. The manual summarizes the factors that promote or limit the possibilities to access proper training in the nursing field. Also, it covers the fundamental learning practices for the students of all levels of medical education. Finally, this document provides the resources helpful in research and practice.
The Challenges of the Implementation of the Essentials
Nursing programs based on the principles of competency, standardized studying, guidelines for training, and the assessment of student’s performance are required at all levels. The AACN essentials include all these competencies in separate documents for each stage of training.
These competencies might be a subject of expansion, and the goal of the AACN is to make them more explicit in the future. Some topics need to be covered better; for example, the reflection of the required skills linked with disaster practice needs significant improvement (Ferrell, & Virani, 2016). However, the existing standards already identify the development of staff in the nursing field through a well-structured approach based on the principles of consensus building.
The other challenge is that the institutions pursue a different approach to the integration of specific practices into the study process (Murphy, Staffileno, & Carlson, 2015). Thus, it is reasonable to promote coalitions of these institutions to build a common strategy. The further documents presented by the AACN need to include standardized skills and practices.
Despite significant improvement in formulating a national strategy of education that is shown through the essentials of AACN, some of its chapters become outdated extremely fast. This process is linked with the fact that scientific advancements in discovering the reasons and treating certain diseases occur faster than the system can react to them. It leads to a situation where the methods of nursing, as well as theoretical fundamentals provided by the Essentials, become irrelevant.
The improvement of the strategies of AACN can happen by means of encouraging volunteering at professional organizations. Such volunteer professionals are a significant help in many cases (Veenema & Larson, 2016). The idea of nurses taking part in volunteering projects, which might be organized by the government or privately, can help in gaining experience, for example, in cases of disaster.
Conclusion
The Essentials of AACN are the unified and standardized guidelines that define all theoretical and practical compliances that nursing staff needs to possess at all levels of training. Even though the theory and methods covered by the Essentials include the most relevant information and techniques, specific chapters of these guidelines need to be a subject of the constant dynamic review. Thus, while the policy-makers need to address this issue, the institutions that train nursing staff need to follow the Essentials as the ultimate guideline for the education of future professionals.
References
Ferrell, B., & Virani, R. (2016). CARES: AACN’s new competencies and recommendations for educating undergraduate nursing students to improve palliative care. Journal of Professional Nursing, 32(5), 327-333.
Murphy, M. P., Staffileno, B.A., & Carlson, E. (2015). Collaboration among DNP- and PhD-prepared nurses: Opportunity to drive positive change. Journal of Professional Nursing, 31(5), 388-394.
Veenema, T.G., & Larson, E. (2016). Nurses as leaders in disaster preparedness and response – A call to action. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 48(2), 187-200.
Wang, J., Guo, R., Liu, M., Zhang, X., Ren, L., Sun, M., & Tang, S. (2018). Career decision-making self-efficacy and professional commitment among Master nursing students. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 40(3), 327–345.