The unpredictable and volatile economic context, ever-changing demography, explosion of technology, and rapid disruptive health delivery models are only a few of the factors characterizing constant flux and chaos permeating the health care system. Nursing leaders and educators have responded by modifying and adapting curricula, adding other and higher academic degrees, and embracing new learning approaches. Yet, these educational initiatives continue to lag behind societal changes and result in corrective and reactive measures rather than reflective and proactive transformations. This paper summarizes the most common measures to challenge healthcare complexities and increase patients’ health outcomes, synthesizes latest propositions and initiatives for a swift focus on more sustainable educational approaches. It also shares the initiatives of a nursing program to contribute, perpetuate, and advance nursing education in the right direction.
Methods:
Many nurse leaders are urging educators to provide students a space to practice critical thinking and develop other inner skills. Doane and Brown (2011) concurred the time has arrived for putting epistemology at the service of ontology. In this learning ambiance, acquisition of competencies for nurses to predict in lieu of reacting to changes should take predominance. Ironside (2004), for example, explained how nursing educators assume critical thinking ability to be the by-product of knowledge and skills and advocated for sustainable approach to nursing education and practice shifting the emphasis of the competencies to what nurses become instead of what they do in order to efficiently confront today’s healthcare complexities. Tanner (2004) asserted: “what if one of the education’s aims was for students to make sense for themselves what life means and how that shows itself every day in nursing practice”. Caputi (2018) proposed new ways for knowledge and skills to be influenced by sound critical reasoning cultivated and used by nurses and nursing students before, during, and after nursing actions, at all levels of their nursing education and career.
Results:
Be Creative
Nursing faculty exposes students to role models who have created. Most students know about Florence Nightingale as a theorist and compassionate but not as an inventor. The nursing faculty encourages students to create out of necessity (Collier, 2013) by giving them the example of Florence Nightingale who was not only the lady of the lamp but also a keen statistician who created the modern circular histogram. In lieu of using words or lists of numbers, she wanted to use color-coded graphics to present a report that could convince the British government to improve the sanitation in its military hospitals during the Crimean War (Christianson, 2012). The faculty encourages students to also create for the sake of creation and discusses how Albert Einstein, in 1905, was rewarded the Nobel Prize for developing the theory of relativity and refuting Newton’s theory of absolute time and space (Ferreira, 2015; Kristjansson, 2014; Lee & Taylor, 2013; Strauss, 2013). Faculty reminds students that, ten years later, in1915, Einstein struggled to develop the theory of unification of all forces in the universe. In fact, he died trying to find the missing component that could have completed his macro perception of the universe (Ferreira, 2015; Paulson, Gleiser, & Freese, 2015). Fortunately and concurrently, a group of quantum physicists with the very same intention as Einstein were experimenting with small particles when they discovered, at the micro level and invisible dimension, the interconnectedness of all things (Paulson, Gleiser, & Freese, 2015; Strauss, 2013). From that principle, quintessential innovations such as the Internet, cell phones, drones, to say the least, were deducted.
Be Patient
Nursing faculty urges students to cultivate patience as an attitude, knowing that what is created is not always readily usable. Sometimes, it takes decades to be translated into practice. Faculty fosters discussions regarding how Martha Rogers‘s Pandimensionlity theory was not readily understood because she was ahead of her time (Johnson, & Webber, 2015) and emphasizes the fact that Madeleine Leininger’s transcultural movement was ignored until it became necessary for the health care system to heed cultural diversity of their clients, patients, and families to support positive health outcomes (Johnson, & Webber, 2015). Faculty also encourages students to muster the nerve to endure critiques of their creation. Even though the latter might be judged as too small, insignificant, or irrelevant, they need to take courage to create anyway knowing that, based on the chaos theory, disorder does not exist (Johnson, & Webber, 2015). Faculty encourages students to seize the opportunity of any transitional period or flux moment, when new knowledge and innovative ideas are not quite settled, to insert their creation in the mist and ensures them that their creation will eventually become part of something bigger and greater.
Be Lifelong-Learners
It takes courage to seek the truth which is not always in the finding but the search itself (Chiang, Leung, Chui, Leung, & Mak, 2013). Faculty informs students that in their quest or journey, there will be moments when they will feel like walking their own Gethsemane and climbing their own Calvary (Dyson, 2004). They are reminded to be good cheers; for, after all, that is where knowledge is uncovered, refined, and augmented. It is also where power resides. Faculty reinforces that each new knowledge acquired and each new answer to a burning question will introduce them to a new set of questions and uncertainties (Billings, & Halstead, 2016; Desilets, & Dickerson, 2013).
Conclusion: Nursing faculty vows to meet their students halfway by cultivating astuteness, the ability to discern in them seeds of sheer transformational leaders, notice the flickering of fine clinicians, and glimpse at their exceptional managerial penchants. The nursing faculty will provide them with the tools needed to grow into their full potential by relinquishing the Aristotle teaching machine focusing on telling students what they need to know because it limits students more than releases them to learn and create.