Theory and practice of professional education / Marie Astrid M. De Leon

In order to ensure that the nursing profession will maintain the quality of nursing professionals, nursing education plays a significant role in its realization. Nursing educators are faced with a great challenge of ensuring that future nurses will not only possess empiric knowledge and technical skills, but attributes such as a caring attitude, life-long learning skills, clinical reasoning and the ability to reflect. These are imperative in ensuring safe, quality, and patient-centered care. Ashworth and Morrison argued that competence-based curriculum is not applicable to Nursing since competence in Nursing is more than skills and knowledge, but includes qualities such as attitudes, motives, personal interests, perceptiveness, receptivity, maturity and aspects of personal identity. Moreover, central to the profession of Nursing is the ability to care. More than knowledge and skills, experienced nurses reported that ethics and values that they apply in the profession were developed during their Nursing education and not merely a result of professional standard monitoring. By limiting the content of professional education to respond to the needs of the society, as dictated by external drivers such as politics and economy, nursing education becomes narrow, producing mechanical nurses fit only for the workforce. Although contemporary nursing role involves more responsibilities, nursing education should not forget that a rich curriculum should not overshadow the role of nurses as providers of care. I believe that although dichotomy is an inevitable part of human thinking, a hybrid of two seemingly opposite teaching approaches would be able to produce the most ideal nurses a nurse who is academically competent, possess lifelong skills, and most of all a nurse who cares.

Nursing.