Abstract
The current paper explores the essentials of Master’s education in nursing as provided by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. After a brief introduction, each of the essentials is discussed individually; the meaning of these essentials is explained, and their effect in the practical setting is elaborated. It is concluded that the nursing essentials provide a framework for nursing education which allows for supplying Master students in nursing with relevant and useful knowledge and skills that can then be implemented by them in order to deliver high-quality patient care, and to improve the currently existing system of health care.
Introduction
The essentials of Master’s education in nursing provided by AACN (2011) play a pivotal role in identifying the main elements which such education should provide for those who attempt to gain it, thus serving as a setoff guiding principles which permit for creating of successful Master of Nursing programs. The current paper considers each of these principles in more detail, explaining their meaning and elaborating their impact on clinical practice.
Essential I: Background for Practice from Sciences and Humanities
The first essential of Master’s education in nursing emphasizes the importance of the nurse’s skill to know and successfully utilize the findings of a variety of fields of study, from genetics and biology to psychology and management. Using these skills allows for providing better care for the patient and using a holistic approach thanks to a comprehensive understanding of the various aspects of an individual as a whole, and thanks to the ability to see faults in care practices and address them (Papathanasiou, Sklavou, & Kourkouta, 2013).
Essential II: Organizational and Systems Leadership
This essential emphasizes that the skills to lead organizations and manage systems are paramount when it comes to increasing the safety and the quality of care for the patient. Having these skills allows the nurse to make effective decisions and organize the nursing processes in a manner that is both effective and efficient.
Essential III: Quality Improvement and Safety
This principle means that a nurse should know and be able to employ the standards, methods, and tools pertaining to quality. The effect of knowing and using such principles ensures that the quality of care provided by nurse does not drop below the generally accepted standards, but instead that attempts are made to improve the quality of care above these standards using well-developed methods.
Essential IV: Translating and Integrating Scholarship into Practice
This essential stresses the importance of utilizing the findings of research studies and evidence-based practice to practical problems within the medical setting. Adhering to this essential means employing theoretically- and practically-tested approaches to nursing care rather than simply acting based on one’s guesses, and further improving nursing routines and practices by finding which ones are most effective in nursing care.
Essential V: Informatics and Healthcare Technologies
This essential provides that a nurse should be able to use the technologies developed for patient care, and implement the innovations in this field to enhance caring practices. Nurses adhering to this essential embrace technological innovations, such as electronic health records (Han et al., 2016), and strive to better implement them in their workplace so as to improve the practices of care and thus to enhance patient outcomes.
Essential VI: Health Policy and Advocacy
The sixth essential provides that a nurse is to be able to affect the health care at the level of the system, changing caring practices via the process of advocacy, policy development and implementation. The utilization of this essential means that nurses should be able to see “the whole picture” of the existing health care system, effectively identify its gaps and faults, develop viable improvements and advocate for their introduction in practice on a system level.
Essential VII: Interprofessional Collaboration for Improving Patient and Population Health Outcomes
This principle means that a nurse, being a member of a team providing health care services for patients, is able to effectively communicate and collaborate with other professionals in the team to supply better care. Nurses complying with this principle can efficaciously communicate, share responsibilities and divide tasks with other members of health care team, thus saving time and resources and employing the potential of the team’s members in its fullness.
Essential VIII: Clinical Prevention and Population Health for Improving Health
The current essential requires that a nurse is able to utilize a variety of skills and concepts while planning and supplying care for a diversity of people on the levels of an individual, family, subpopulations, and the whole population. A nurse using this essential can use culturally appropriate approaches to a variety of patients and effectively use their skills for future health problems prevention and for helping those who already experience such problems at different levels.
Essential IX: Master’s-Level Nursing Practice
This last essential highlights the importance of possessing the knowledge of nursing and of the sciences which are relevant for patient care at an advanced level, as well as the importance of being able to appropriately integrate this knowledge into caring practices. Complying with this principle means that nurses effectively utilize such knowledge so as to deliver better care for the population at the levels of individuals, families, populations, and systems.
Conclusion
On the whole, it should be stressed that the AACN (2011) essentials of Master’s education in nursing play a critical role in defining the main directions of such education, serving as guidelines for both nurse educators in curriculum preparation and nursing students in their learning endeavors. Adhering to these principles ensures that nurses gain useful knowledge and skills during their Master’s education so as to provide high-quality care for their patients.
References
AACN. (2011). The essentials of Master’s education in nursing.
Han, J. E., Rabinovich, M., Abraham, P., Satyanarayana, P., Liao, T. V., Udoji, T. N.,…Martin, G. S. (2016). Effect of electronic health record implementation in critical care on survival and medication errors. The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 351(6), 576-581.
Papathanasiou, I., Sklavou, M., & Kourkouta, L. (2013). Holistic nursing care: Theories and perspectives. American Journal of Nursing Science, 2(1), 1-5.