J Nurs Educ
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Although most nurses believe spiritual care is an integral component of quality, holistic nursing care, they rarely address spiritual issues and typically feel unprepared to do so. One reason for nurses' lack of preparedness to provide spiritual interventions is that their basic education only minimally discusses spirituality and related issues. This is compounded by the problem that only sporadic reference to spiritual care is found in most nursing textbooks. ⋯ Although there was considerable variation among the books from all specialty areas, overall, hospice/terminal care, fundamentals of nursing, health assessment/health promotion, and transcultural nursing textbooks provided the most information about spirituality and spiritual care. Textbooks focusing on professional issues, medical-surgical nursing, maternal-child health nursing, critical care nursing, and community health nursing contained the least spiritual content. Suggestions are made regarding how to integrate spiritual issues and spiritual care in all nursing textbooks that pertain directly to patient care.
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For more than 25 years, reliance on conventional pedagogy has led nurse educators to persistently focus on what students need to learn to enter contemporary practice settings. Therefore, as biomedical and nursing knowledge grows and the health care system in which students will practice becomes increasingly complex, content is persistently added to nursing curricula, while little is taken out. ⋯ This study, using Heideggerian hermeneutics, examines the relationship between covering content and thinking by explicating the common experiences of teachers enacting interpretive pedagogies. One of the themes that emerged from this analysis is presented: "Covering Content" and Teaching Thinking: Deconstructing the Additive Curriculum.
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Nursing identity is a developmental process that evolves throughout professional nurses' careers. Educational systems that prepare nurses include experiences that are important in the early development of nursing identity. Therefore, faculty in nursing programs are interested in understanding how their students perceive and define professional identity. ⋯ These results demonstrate that nursing students come to an educational program with more than a rudimentary conception of professional identity. Use of these data may lead to opportunities to improve nursing students' educational experiences and foster the development of professional identity. Faculty can use knowledge of students' definitions of nursing to enrich student learning.
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This study focused on the identification of entry-level competencies needed by bachelor of science in nursing (BSN) graduates who will begin working in acute health care agencies in Tennessee within 10 years. The purpose of this study was to increase awareness of the competencies needed by graduates of BSN programs in Tennessee to meet the demands of acute health care agencies, considering current and anticipated changes in the healthcare delivery system. The opinions of nurse educators, nurse administrators, recent BSN graduates, and experienced BSN graduates were solicited to assess congruency of perceptions. This study found there was a statistically significant difference in the perceptions of nurses in acute health care agencies and faculty in BSN programs about the importance of entry-level competencies needed by BSN graduates.