Translating Learning Outcomes to Enhance Teaching and Curricula

Recent healthcare reform is striving to improve the quality and safety of care and improve patient outcomes; care coordination may contribute significantly to achieving these goals. Nurse educators work diligently to prepare students for the current and future demands of professional practice. According to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Future of Nursing report (2010), baccalaureate-nursing education must increase its emphasis on the professional nursing role of care coordination in order to meet changing health care needs. This includes the ability to practice to the full scope of professional education and licensure in community and ambulatory care settings, which is as important as practice in acute care settings (IOM, 2010). The third part of this symposium will present the implementation and results of a research study that assessed the impact of a Patient-Centered Care Coordination (PCCC) clinical module on student learning. Students who were enrolled in a junior level clinical course that incorporated an emphasis on the care of patients with chronic illness were recruited to participate in the study. In addition to medical/surgical and mental health acute care clinical experiences, students in this course completed a half-semester module of clinical experiences that shared an emphasis on the care and coordination of patients with chronic illnesses in non-hospital settings. The study used a non-experimental, mixed methods design. Quantitative data collection instruments included The Interpersonal Communication Style Inventory (ICSI) (Tanner, 2011), scored by one of the co-investigators during a telephone interaction between the student and a simulated virtual patient during the ambulatory care virtual clinical. A pretest/posttest measured students’ confidence in self-management support of patients with chronic illness. In addition, qualitative data were collected through focus groups held at the completion of the clinical module. The results of this study shed light on the impact of intentional clinical experiences in non-acute care settings. Research about teaching care coordination in nursing education is scarce, so by investigating the impact of an integrated PCCC curricular module on nursing student-learning outcomes, this study contributes to the evidence about student learning outcomes for PCCC.