Nursing Program Profile

LEARNING OUTCOMES

The goals and outcomes of the Nursing Department correspond with the goals explained in the Educational Framework of Dordt University (Dordt University, 1993), The Essentials of Baccalaureate Education for Professional Nursing Practice (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2024) and the American Nurses Association Scope and Standards of Practice (American Nurses Association, 2021).

Graduates of the Dordt University nursing education program will:

RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION

Demonstrate an understanding of the Biblical covenants and Reformed teachings that guide their critical inquiry, discernment in decision-making, and commitment to transformative actions in professional nursing practice.

• Outcome 1.a: Acknowledge ethical data management, and with an attitude of openness to innovation demonstrate competency with information systems, patient care technologies, and decision-support systems.

• Outcome 1.b: Integrate knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values from the arts and sciences to provide transformative care to individuals, families, groups, communities, and populations.

• Outcome 1.c: Demonstrate effective communication and collaboration with colleagues, patients, and diverse health professionals for improving patient health outcomes.

CREATIONAL STRUCTURE

Demonstrate an appreciation for the diversity of God’s creation and the interdependent responsibilities of humanity to care for all of creation.

• Outcome 2.a: Identify determinants of health and convey knowledge about health promotion, disease and injury prevention, and risk assessment throughout the lifespan.

• Outcome 2.b: Demonstrate knowledge needed to provide culturally sensitive nursing interventions in multicultural environments.

• Outcome 2.c: Demonstrate collaborative clinical interventions with other health professionals focused on prevention of diseases and injuries.

CREATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Demonstrate an ability to critically analyze determinants of, and processes and connections in health and illness, and to evaluate the nature of forces influencing health care.

• Outcome 3.a: Implement safety principles and work with others on the inter-professional healthcare team to create safe, nurturing environments for care delivery.

• Outcome 3.b: Demonstrate mastery of scientific principles and clinical reasoning within the context of patient-centered care to form the basis for competent nursing practice in complex practice environments.

• Outcome 3.c: Demonstrate understanding of health care issue identification, healthcare policy development and changes, and how these processes can be influenced while advocating for social justice among vulnerable populations.

Servant-Leadership

Demonstrate developing strategies for life-long learning and servant-leadership in nursing practice.

• Outcome 4.a: Integrate reliable evidence from multiple ways of knowing to inform practice and make clinical judgments, and to participate in documenting and interpreting evidence for improving patient outcomes.

• Outcome 4.b: Demonstrate Reformational values evidenced by behaviors of grace and humility, increasing in wisdom, compassion, and sensitivity to the impact of sin in human society, translating these characteristics into a faithful response to God.

• Outcome 4.c: Convey creativity and leadership to work productively within inter-professional teams in diverse healthcare settings.

PROGRAM STRENGTHS

• Christ-centered education
• Early application acceptance
• Co-located classrooms, labs, and faculty
• Seamless interdepartmental collaboration
• Opportunity for co-curricular participation
• Established four-year, eight-semester plan of study
• Immediate availability to student support resources
• Residential campus experience
• Professing Christian faculty and administration
• Concept-based curriculum

PROGRAM PHILOSOPHY

The Nursing Department believes all people and things are God’s creation and find their purpose in Him. As such, nurses are bound to scripture, and in loving obedience are called to live out nursing practice so as to bring glory to God. In so doing, nursing students are to be nurtured to achieve transformed nursing knowledge and skills that will contribute to the reformation of the discipline and God’s world as a whole.

Commensurate with the global perspective shared within the plurality of nursing practice, the Dordt University Nursing Department gives transformative meaning to the discipline’s metaparadigm in the following way:

Nursing students, as persons, are integrated, multidimensional beings made in the image of God, called to redeeming work in His kingdom. In expression of their unique personhood, as individuals they are embodied spiritual beings having physical, emotional, and social dimensions. They possess abilities, accumulate experiences, and develop values in response to the formative influences that surround them.

Nursing students are the future of nursing practice and, as such, are learning nursing processes and increasing wisdom, working toward exemplary Christ-like service to humanity as well as all of God’s creation. Transformed nursing practice demonstrates discernment of the human response in health or in illness experiences and works toward shalom-creating relationship restoration with persons in our care.

Nursing students are guided to understand health as a state of being characterized by the flourishing of a person’s abilities to be the servant he or she is called by God to be. Health is individually experienced and therefore individually formalized. Health is as diverse as God’s creation and correspondingly interdependent.

A learning environment is pivotal to the formation of a nursing student into a professional nurse. It fosters and expands multidimensional nursing theory and practice, and integrates the developing knowledge, skills, and attitudes into the insight that will sustain lifelong, responsible, health-oriented service in God’s kingdom.

Nursing education is a process of formative learning where the nursing student, as an image-bearer of God, is nurtured through ongoing student-centered learning that leads toward the understanding of creational structure and function culminating in baccalaureate generalist nursing practice.