The Essentials of Master’s Education in Nursing March 21, 2011 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 3 Master’s Education in Nursing and Areas of Practice 5 Context for Nursing Practice 6 Master’s Nursing Education Curriculum 7 The Essentials of Master’s Education in Nursing I. Background for Practice from Sciences and Humanities 9 II. Organizational and Systems Leadership 11 III. Quality Improvement and Safety 13 IV.
Translating and Integrating Scholarship into Practice 15 V. Informatics and Healthcare Technologies 17 VI. Health Policy and Advocacy 20 VII. Interprofessional Collaboration for Improving Patient and Population Health Outcomes 22 VIII.
Clinical Prevention and Population Health for Improving Health 24 IX. Master’s-Level Nursing Practice 26 Clinical/Practice Learning Expectations for Master’s Programs 29 Summary 31 Glossary 31 1 References 40 Appendix A: Task Force on the Essentials of Master’s Education in Nursing 49 Appendix B: Participants who attended Stakeholder Meetings 50 Appendix C: Schools of Nursing that Participated in the Regional Meetings or Provided Feedback 52 Appendix D: Professional Organizations that Participated in the Regional Meetings or Provided Feedback 63 Appendix E: Healthcare Systems that Participated in the Regional Meetings 64 2 The Essentials of Master’s Education in Nursing March 21, 2011 The Essentials of Master’s Education in Nursing reflect the profession’s continuing call for imagination, transformative thinking, and evolutionary change in graduate education. The extraordinary explosion of knowledge, expanding technologies, increasing diversity, and global health challenges produce a dynamic environment for nursing and amplify nursing’s critical contributions to health care. Master’s education prepares nurses for flexible leadership and critical action within complex, changing systems, including health, educational, and organizational systems.
Master’s education equips nurses with valuable knowledge and skills to lead change, promote health, and elevate care in various roles and settings. Synergy with these Essentials, current and future healthcare reform legislation, and the action-oriented recommendations of the Initiative on the Future of Nursing (IOM, 2010) highlights the value and transforming potential of the nursing profession. These Essentials are core for all master’s programs in nursing and provide the necessary curricular elements and framework, regardless of focus, major, or intended practice setting. These Essentials delineate the outcomes expected of all graduates of master’s nursing programs.
These Essentials are not prescriptive directives on the design of programs. Consistent with the Baccalaureate and Doctorate of Nursing Practice Essentials, this document does not address preparation for specific roles, which may change and emerge over time. These Essentials also provide guidance for master’s programs during a time when preparation for specialty advanced nursing practice is transitioning to the doctoral level. Master’s education remains a critical component of the nursing education trajectory to prepare nurses who can address the gaps resulting from growing healthcare needs.
Nurses who obtain the competencies outlined in these Essentials have significant value for current and emerging roles in healthcare delivery and design through advanced nursing knowledge and higher level leadership skills for improving health outcomes. For some nurses, master’s education equips them with a fulfilling lifetime expression of their mastery area. For others, this core is a graduate foundation for doctoral education. Each preparation is valued.
Introduction The dynamic nature of the healthcare delivery system underscores the need for the nursing profession to look to the future and anticipate the healthcare needs for which nurses must be prepared to address. The complexities of health and nursing care today make expanded nursing knowledge a necessity in contemporary care settings. The transformation of health care and nursing practice requires a new conceptualization of master’s education. Master’s education must prepare the graduate to: • Lead change to improve quality outcomes, 3 • Advance a culture of excellence through lifelong learning, • Build and lead collaborative interprofessional care teams, • Navigate and integrate care services across the healthcare system, • Design innovative nursing practices, and • Translate evidence into practice.
Graduates of master’s degree programs in nursing are prepared with broad knowledge and practice expertise that builds and expands on baccalaureate or entry-level nursing practice. This preparation provides graduates with a fuller understanding of the discipline of nursing in order to engage in higher level practice and leadership in a variety of settings and commit to lifelong learning. For those nurses seeking a terminal degree, the highest level of preparation within the discipline, the new conceptualization for master’s education will allow for seamless movement into a research or practice-focused doctoral program (AACN, 2006, 2010). The nine Essentials addressed in this document delineate the knowledge and skills that all nurses prepared in master’s nursing programs acquire.
These Essentials guide the preparation of graduates for diverse areas of practice in any healthcare setting. • Essential I: Background for Practice from Sciences and Humanities o Recognizes that the master’s-prepared nurse integrates scientific findings from nursing, biopsychosocial fields, genetics, public health, quality improvement, and organizational sciences for the continual improvement of nursing care across diverse settings. • Essential II: Organizational and Systems Leadership o Recognizes that organizational and systems leadership are critical to the promotion of high quality and safe patient care. Leadership skills are needed that emphasize ethical and critical decision making, effective working relationships, and a systems-perspective.
• Essential III: Quality Improvement and Safety o Recognizes that a master’s-prepared nurse must be articulate in the methods, tools, performance measures, and standards related to quality, as well as prepared to apply quality principles within an organization. • Essential IV: Translating and Integrating Scholarship into Practice o Recognizes that the master’s-prepared nurse applies research outcomes within the practice setting, resolves practice problems, works as a change agent, and disseminates results. • Essential V: Informatics and Healthcare Technologies 4 o Recognizes that the master’s-prepared nurse uses patient-care technologies to deliver and enhance care and uses communication technologies to integrate and coordinate care. • Essential VI: Health Policy and Advocacy o Recognizes that the master’s-prepared nurse is able to intervene at the system level through the policy development process and to employ advocacy strategies to influence health and health care.
• Essential VII: Interprofessional Collaboration for Improving Patient and Population Health Outcomes o Recognizes that the master’s-prepared nurse, as a member and leader of interprofessional teams, communicates, collaborates, and consults with other health professionals to manage and coordinate care. • Essential VIII: Clinical Prevention and Population Health for Improving Health o Recognizes that the master’s-prepared nurse applies and integrates broad, organizational, client-centered, and culturally appropriate concepts in the planning, delivery, management, and evaluation of evidence-based clinical prevention and population care and services to individuals, families, and aggregates/identified populations. • Essential IX: Master’s-Level Nursing Practice o Recognizes that nursing practice, at the master’s level, is broadly defined as any form of nursing intervention that influences healthcare outcomes for individuals, populations, or systems. Master’s-level nursing graduates must have an advanced level of understanding of nursing and relevant sciences as well as the ability to integrate this knowledge into practice.
Nursing practice interventions include both direct and indirect care components. Master’s Education in Nursing and Areas of Practice Graduates with a master’s degree in nursing are prepared for a variety of roles and areas of practice. Graduates may pursue new and innovative roles that result from health reform and changes in an evolving and global healthcare system. Some graduates will pursue direct care practice roles in a variety of settings (e., the Clinical Nurse Leader, nurse educator).
Others may choose indirect care roles or areas of practice that focus on aggregate, systems, or have an organizational focus, (e. nursing or health program management, informatics, public health, or clinical research coordinator). In addition to developing competence in the nine Essential core areas delineated in this document, each graduate will have additional coursework in an area of practice or functional role. This coursework may include more in-depth preparation and competence in one or two of the Essentials or in an additional/ supplementary area of practice.
For example, more concentrated coursework or further development of the knowledge and skills embedded in Essential IV (Translational Scholarship for Evidence-Based Practice) will prepare the nurse to manage research projects for nurse scientists and other 5 healthcare researchers working in multi-professional research teams. More in-depth preparation in Essential II (Organizational and System Leadership) will provide knowledge useful for nursing management roles. In some instances, graduates of master’s in nursing programs will seek to fill roles as educators. As outlined in Essential IX, all master’s-prepared nurses will develop competence in applying teaching/learning principles in work with patients and/or students across the continuum of care in a variety of settings.
However, as recommended in the Carnegie Foundation report (2009), Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation, those individuals, as do all master’s graduates, who choose a nurse educator role require preparation across all nine Essential areas, including graduate-level clinical practice content and experiences. In addition, a program preparing individuals for a nurse educator role should include preparation in curriculum design and development, teaching methodologies, educational needs assessment, and learner-centered theories and methods. Master’s prepared nurses may teach patients and their families and/or student nurses, staff nurses, and variety of direct-care providers. The master’s prepared nurse educator differs from the BSN nurse in depth of his/her understanding of the nursing discipline, nursing practice, and the added pedagogical skills.
To teach students, patients, and caregivers regarding health promotion, disease prevention, or disease management, the master’s-prepared nurse educator builds on baccalaureate knowledge with graduate- level content in the areas of health assessment, physiology/pathophysiology, and pharmacology to strengthen his/her scientific background and facilitate his/her understanding of nursing and health-related information. Those master’s students who aspire to faculty roles in baccalaureate and higher degree programs will be advised that additional education at the doctoral level is needed (AACN, 2008). Context for Nursing Practice Health care in the United States and globally is changing dramatically. Interest in evolving health care has prompted greater focus on health promotion and illness prevention, along with cost-effective approaches to high acuity, chronic disease management, care coordination, and long-term care.
Public concerns about cost of health care, fiscal sustainability, healthcare quality, and development of sustainable solutions to healthcare problems are driving reform efforts. Attention to affordability and accessibility of health care, maintaining healthy environments, and promoting personal and community responsibility for health is growing among the public and policy makers. In addition to broad public mandates for a reformed and responsive healthcare system, a number of groups are calling for changes in the ways all health professionals are educated to meet current and projected needs for contemporary care delivery. The Institute of 6 Medicine (IOM), an interprofessional healthcare panel, described a set of core competencies that all health professionals regardless of discipline will demonstrate: 1) the provision of patient-centered care, 2) working in interprofessional teams, 3) employing evidence-based practice, 4) applying quality improvement approaches, and 5) utilizing informatics (IOM, 2003).
Given the ongoing public trust in nursing (Gallup, 2010), and the desire for fundamental reorganization of relationships among individuals, the public, healthcare organizations and healthcare professionals, graduate education for nurses is needed that is wide in scope and breadth, emphasizes all systems-level care and includes mastery of practice knowledge and skills. Such preparation reflects mastery of higher level thinking and conceptualization skills than at the baccalaureate level, as well as an understanding of the interrelationships among practice, ethical, and legal issues; financial concerns and comparative effectiveness; and interprofessional teamwork. Master’s Nursing Education Curriculum The master’s nursing curriculum is conceptualized in Figure 1 and includes three components: 1. Graduate Nursing Core: foundational curriculum content deemed essential for all students who pursue a master’s degree in nursing regardless of the functional focus.
Direct Care Core: essential content to provide direct patient services at an advanced level. Functional Area Content: those clinical and didactic learning experiences identified and defined by the professional nursing organizations and certification bodies for specific nursing roles or functions. This document delineates the graduate nursing core competencies for all master’s graduates. These core outcomes reflect the many changes in the healthcare system occurring over the past decade.
