Nursing Credit for Prior Learning and Successful Completion of NCLEX-RN: 30 Credits
Core Courses:
Leadership and Management in Nursing
This course focuses on the application of leadership and management concepts and theories; inter-professional communication and collaboration; and evidence-based strategies and inquiry within health care organizations. Team building, quality improvement, patient and staff safety, and fiscal management are addressed within the role of baccalaureate-prepared nurse leader and manager across a variety of health care settings.
Community Health Nursing Caring for the Public’s Health
This course integrates evidence, theory, standards, and knowledge from nursing, public health, and other disciplines to guide population-focused nursing practice. Importance is placed on the application of the core functions of public health: assessment, policy development, and the assurance of available and necessary health services for diverse populations. Emphasis is placed in identifying determinants of health, advocating for vulnerable populations, prioritizing primary prevention, and utilizing available resources to improve the health of populations. Population-focused nursing involves assessing the health care needs of a specific population and making health care decisions for the population as a whole rather than for individuals. This course includes practice experiences in the community.
Transformational Nursing: Innovation, Inquiry, and Scholarship
This course explores how nursing may be transformed. The ways of knowing set a foundation for knowledge acquisition and competencies for master’s-prepared nurses. The need for nurses to be innovators, through the application of inquiry and scholarship, are discussed in relation to such topics as leadership, change, and power. Theory-based and scientific competencies are examined as they relate to specializations in nursing. A spirit of inquiry, combined with creativity, curiosity, and the translation of evidence, is explored through critical conversations that support interprofessional collaboration and professional nursing roles in a dynamic healthcare environment.
Theoretical Foundations of Nursing Practice
Theoretical Foundations of Nursing Practice focuses on the exploration of nursing knowledge development to include philosophy, theories, models, and concepts that have been designed to guide nursing practice. It provides approaches to analyze and critique a variety of theories in nursing and related fields.
Advanced Physical Assessment
This course focuses on the advanced comprehensive assessment of individuals. It builds on the students’ knowledge and skills and provides a foundation for the advanced practice nurse to evaluate the health of individuals and provide health promotion interventions. The interactions of developmental, biopsychosocial, and socio-cultural contexts resulting in health effects for individuals provide the structure of the course. Students obtain the practice skills necessary for advanced communication (i.e., clinical interviewing, focused history taking), biopsychosocial and physical assessment, critical diagnostic reasoning, differential diagnosis, and clinical decision-making through course readings, dialog, discussions, videos, simulations, and practical examinations. This course includes 45 hours of clinical experience.
Research and Evidence-Based Practice
Research and Evidenced-Based Practice focuses on the research process and the analysis and evaluation of research to integrate the best evidence into practice. Emphasis is on the identification of generic and discipline-specific health care issues, synthesis of client care and research initiatives to inform evidence, and translation of research to support and inform practice innovations.
Policy, Ethics, and Population Health
This course examines public policy, political ideology, and ethics as they shape health policy across populations. Political ideology, social and health policy are considered within the lens of population based health and reducing health disparities. The role of the master’s-prepared nurse is to lead and advocate within the public policy arena is explored and discussed. Contemporary issues in health policy viewed from the perspective of ethics and the social and material determinants of health are considered. A primary focus of the course is consideration and development of the knowledge and skills that the master’s-prepared nurse needs as a change agent in health policy.
Nursing Capstone
This capstone course focuses on integration and synthesis of knowledge, skills, and competencies from nursing, other disciplines, and the arts and sciences. Application of specific concepts and theories, such as communication, critical thinking, and leadership, enables students to transform theory to practice within health care systems. This course includes practice experiences.