Education Capacity

In a March 14 edition of New Hampshire Public Radio’s “The Exchange,” New Hampshire Action Coalition co-lead Linda Von Reyn joined a panel discussing the evolving health care needs of Americans and what that means for nursing education. Linda, who also serves as Chief Nursing Officer for Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, talked about the Campaign for Action and the IOM’s call for an increase in the proportion of nurses with baccalaureate and higher degrees to 80 percent by 2020.

Health care organizations, educational institutions and others are looking intently at the case for advancing nursing education as outlined IOM report. “The Nurse Education Imperative,” a guest editorial by Risa Lavizzo-Mourey in the March 2012 issue of Nursing Outlook, outlines the growing need for nurses educated at the Baccalaureate of Science in Nursing level and beyond and describes the benefits to health care organizations of supporting education progression.

In this picture, a senior nursing clinical student from Villanova University College of Nursing in Villanova, PA, gives instructions to a patient during her clinical practicum in April 2011. The practicum gives students experience providing nursing care to community members in the home health setting.

Using the August 2011 issue of its Charting Nursing’s Future, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) published the first a four-part miniseries brief designed to stimulate conversation on the important areas of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health.