NURS FPX 6108 Assessment 4 Course Development and Influencing Factors

• NURS FPX6108 Assessment 4 

Course Development and Influencing Factors

Student name

NURS FPX 6108

Capella University

Professor Name

Submission Date

The provision of a robust curriculum makes it possible to achieve the outcome of producing healthcare professionals with high skills and abilities. An excellent curriculum for nursing education will develop a nursing student who will possess the knowledge and skills and ultimately, the competencies to respond and manage the needs and challenges of advanced and changing healthcare systems.

The curriculum in nursing education needs to be adaptable and responsive to the requirements of the profession (e.g., AACN Essentials), healthcare systems, and technologies (Lewis et al., 2022). The University of Pittsburgh’s Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) Curriculum emphasizes the AACN Essentials. The objectives of this paper are to describe various aspects of the curriculum orientation, curriculum design, internal and external aspects of motivation, and collaboration that arise from the mission of the institution and its stakeholders.

Course for Curriculum

Advanced Nursing Informatics and Digital Health is a course we are designing for the University of Pittsburgh’s BSN program development. We plan to tie the class into our 3rd and 4th-year classes at the very least. From working on basic skills, students will be moving to advanced courses, which will build their clinical skills and clinical communication. This course will be a core course and blend theory, simulation, and practice of electronic health records (EHR). One of the two AACN Essentials (2021) will be included in the course—quality and safety, and the other—informatics and healthcare technologies (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2021). The course may also be offered as a competency-based organization of learning (as defined) in the Pitt BSN program, where the program already has stated competencies.

Rationale for Adding Course

Technology in the health care environment has led to the evolution of health care informatics as a key component of health care delivery systems. These challenges require technology to be used alongside the knowledge of the individual patient’s needs to support the nursing clinician’s decision-making process (Hants et al., 2023). This is a void in the nursing education system that has been filled with some aspects of informatics over the years in the current curriculum, but it is having a cumulative impact on students.

This is the opening in the course that students will have to grasp the EHRs, analytics, and digital health technologies. In addition, the course will help students to provide safe and quality care. The nurses, equipped with informatics knowledge and skills, will provide safe care to their patients and help to reduce these errors as detailed in this paper. In addition, the course will meet the requirements of the NCLEX and give the nursing graduates actual hands-on preparation for the NCLEX.

External Factor Impact on Curriculum Design

Rapid change of information technologies in health care is the centre of the nursing curriculum design. The COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, accelerated the adoption of telehealth, RPM, and AI (Amjad et al., 2023). These technologies have turned the relationship between a nurse and caregiver upside down, and made very basic skills with digital health and nursing informatics necessary for a nurse. Therefore, School Nursing curricula should include technology, and nursing students will need to learn and interact with the technologies available. Also, the requirement to manage and use data to solve the challenges in population health provides grounds to include nursing informatics in nursing education curricula.

When creating a curriculum, it is important to take into account the requirements of regulating and accrediting bodies. The curricula included in nursing programs must meet the standards of different nursing associations, including the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE) and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) (Welch and Smith, 2022). Quality improvement, data-driven advocacy for care, and the restructuring of programs within the AACN Essentials (2021) are just a few examples of the need for both advocacy and care. With this kind of market, hospitals will have to hire nurses who can use technology and communicate with data. The need for embedding a flexible, timely, and relevant model of the curricula related to the nursing profession is due to external factors.

Internal Collaboration Framework for Successful Curriculum Design

An effective curriculum designer is one who has the power to conduct sufficient consultations with the key stakeholders of the institution (Kumar & Rewari, 2022). Faculty members play an important role in the creation of educational materials and in trying to ensure educational outcomes correspond to the different standards for professional and academic accreditation. They also play a role in developing some of the curriculum. Committees are essential to the revision and approval of the curriculum to conform to the goal of the institution, the standards for accreditation, and institutional improvement. The simulation lab coordinators likewise play a particular role and are irreplaceable. Validated Exercises are moved from the Simulation Lab to the Clinical/Technical Skills Instruction.

The head of the stakeholder group will be the chain of command leaders from the stakeholder group (who will determine the overall direction of the changes in the curriculum): The program directors in the group (e.g., deans’ heads) will adjust the curriculum changes in line with the institution’s mission/ goals. Concentrating employees’ activities in the organisation (e.g., through regular meetings) has also helped in developing a quality / consistent curriculum (Brown et al, 2023). The element of decision-making touches on the degree of appreciation of the value of a curriculum. Student performance data, course evaluations, and NCLEX test score data are used at this point to identify and prioritize curricular improvement focus areas.

Typical Outline for Course

This course will focus on issues related to the current advances in nursing, as well as elements of Advanced Nursing Informatics. There are many areas in the field of Advanced Nursing Informatics, such as Clinical Decision Support, Electronic Health Records, and Health Informatics. Students will be exposed to Data Analytics and tools that can be used to improve patient outcomes.

The course will also include coverage of continuous virtual patient engagement, utilizing AI-based therapy, and integrating Artificial Intelligence into the Telehealth model. Also, the course will examine patient privacy and patient data requirements, such as the Privacy and Security of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The learner will have completed a number of simulations of clinical practice situations in this course to increase his or her understanding and integration of informatics into practice. This will equip students with the relevant skills and knowledge, and help them to explore the subject theory.

Topics Link to Other Courses

This will be an added enhancement to the curriculum of the BSN courses, where they will now be covering comorbidities. Open resources will be available in NURS 4040 – Evidence-based Practice and Research. Students will interpret data and research and utilize learning in a classroom-type computer lab to simulate a clinic environment. In NURS 4030: Nursing Leadership and Management, participants use information to make administrative choices and drive modifications throughout the organization. Constructing lessons for the clinic, interpreting patient data, and interacting with data collected in EHR systems will be taught. It will come in handy with greater difficulty. The new course will enhance the curriculum’s effectiveness and efficiency due to the degree of integration with other courses.

Institutional Mission, Philosophy, and Framework’s Impact on Curriculum Design

The University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing leads nursing education with the inclusion of its philosophy of Patient-Centered Care in its curriculum. The patient care informatics course has been offered to many students in the School of Nursing, demonstrating to students how to use technology to have a positive impact on patient care.

The philosophy of practice in the School of Nursing is data and digital technology, and to have students practice the competencies they are being taught, the AACN Essentials (2021) framework is used (Vortman et al., 2024). Pupils have also learned about cultural diversity, equity, and inclusion, which enables them to engage with diverse populations and manage the data to minimise the health inequities. These constructs are derived from above based on the conjunction of theories from the institutional, professional, and curricular theories.

Types of Collaboration Needed by Internal and External Stakeholders

The following internal stakeholders will be involved in the development of the curriculum: academic leaders, Curriculum committee members, Curriculum committee faculty who support the Course Development, and Instructional faculty. Our clinical partners are one of the external stakeholders that will be involved in curriculum development and implementation.

Technology professionals may be required to develop informatics systems coursework to augment what is being provided by our clinical partners in order to make the workforce informatics-ready. The accrediting body (CCNE) has The Good Curriculum (DelMonte et al., 2022). Employers/Healthcare institutions make comments in relation to their preparedness to practice. This collaboration and support will be achieved via our advisory committees and partnerships, and through regular feedback on the effectiveness and relevance of our curriculum.

Consequences for not collaborating

If the collaboration is not applied in the curriculum development process, it will have an impact on the curriculum development process that cannot be traced back. If not done in tandem, then nobody uses it, and it soon becomes outmoded and irrelevant to the existing curriculum in the healthcare system. Students who have completed such a curriculum won’t be ready to be placed because they don’t have even the elementary skills to work in a clinic.

Both Sheikoleslami et al. (2025) and McCabe (2016) outlined that unethical practice would negatively affect the quality of the program and the NCLEX pass rates. Furthermore, the unmet employment gap eventually will result in poor work, diminished customer service to the patients, and adverse effects on the patient care process. Accreditation and quality of the program will be threatened by an unwillingness to collaborate. The program will be worse off as collaboration makes the curriculum better and more relevant.

Conclusion

Certainly, designing a nursing education curriculum is challenging. It should be well organized, supported, and suitable for the profession. The most important of all the changes is the implementation of the new technology of nursing informatics and digital health. Currently, there is very little focus on the integration of technology in the existing BSN curriculum, and the BSN arena of practice is crying out for a creative spark. In the context of the curriculum relevance, the component technologies and the needs of the workforce, external and internal forces of the advance of technology, the internal workforce, and the institutional value are all of great consideration.

References

American Association of Colleges of Nursing. (2021). AACN Essentials. Www.aacnnursing.org. https://www.aacnnursing.org/Essentials

Amjad, A., Kordel, P., & Fernandes, G. (2023). A review of innovation in the healthcare sector (telehealth) through artificial intelligence. Sustainability, 15(8), 6655. mdpi. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15086655

Brown, S.-A., Sparapani, R., Osinski, K., Zhang, J., Blessing, J., Cheng, F., Hamid, A., MohamadiPour, M. B., Lal, J. C., Kothari, A. N., Caraballo, P., Noseworthy, P., Johnson, R. H., Hansen, K., Sun, L. Y., Crotty, B., Cheng, Y. C., Echefu, G., Doshi, K., & Olson, J. (2023). Team principles for successful interdisciplinary research teams. American Heart Journal Plus: Cardiology Research and Practice, 32, 100306. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ahjo.2023.100306

DelMonte, J., Murray, B., & Burke, K. (2022). Overview of the revised Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education entry-to-practice nurse residency program accreditation standards. Journal for Nurses in Professional Development, 38(3), 159–162. https://doi.org/10.1097/NND.0000000000000893

Kumar, V., & Rewari, M. (2022). A responsible approach to higher education curriculum design. International Journal of Educational Reform, 31(4), 422–441. https://doi.org/10.1177/10567879221110509

Lewis, L. S., Rebeschi, L. M., & Hunt, E. (2022). Nursing education practice update 2022: Competency-Based education in nursing. SAGE Open Nursing, 8(8). https://doi.org/10.1177/23779608221140774

Examining factors associated with attrition, strategies for retention among undergraduate nursing students, and identifying research gaps: A scoping review. Nursing Reports, 15(6), 182–182. https://doi.org/10.3390/nursrep15060182