Student Name

Capella University

NURS-FPX6108 Curriculum Overview: Design, Develop and Evaluate

Professor Name

Submission Date

Course Development and Influencing Factors

It is a popular procedure in developing the nursing education program, which provides confident and safe healthcare professionals. The effectiveness of a well-designed curriculum in ensuring that the nursing learner is well prepared in terms of knowledge, skills, and competencies that will take him/her a notch to handle the challenges and requirements of the new healthcare systems will also be effective. The nursing curriculum needs to be regulated according to the needs and requirements of the profession, e.g., the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) Essentials and emerging needs of the healthcare and developing technologies (Lewis et al., 2022). The Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) course offered at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) and described above is based on a model of competency-based education (CBE) proposed and inspired by the use of the AACN Essentials model of education. In this paper, we will look at a search for another way of orientation of this curriculum, and in parallel, at the internal and external motivation of curriculum design, which we treat here under the three aspects of cooperation, the institutional mission, and the involvement of the stakeholders.

Course for Curriculum

This new course is called Advanced Nursing Informatics and Digital Health, and will have to be offered to the University of Pittsburgh BSN. We will certainly be incorporating this course in year 3 or 4, as these students will no longer be implementing the same old foundation, but now they will be able to do this out-of-this-world study course that will make them much more clinical and outspoken. It will be offered as one of the main courses either with an optional 3 or 4 credit hours and will be a blended course comprising of presentation, simulation and practice of the use of electronic health record (EHR) systems. The courses will be based on one of the 2 AACN Essentials (2021) – area of informatics and technologies in healthcare or quality and safety (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2021). Instead, the course might also be converted to an organization competency-based learning organization that already exists in the Pitt BSN program, as the latter already has measurable competencies.

• Rationale for Adding Course

Increased applications of technology in the provision of health care and advanced courses in informatics should be offered as well. The issue in nursing practice at the moment demands knowledge on how to employ online technology, comprehend the details regarding the patients, and use technology in making clinical decisions (Hants et al., 2023). Although the current curriculum has surely been gradually but consistently introducing increasing numbers of learners into the world of informatics, have been able to fill this gap; as such, it has been putting more learners into informatics training. This is an area that the course will not have left any footprints since the students will be ready to utilize EHRs, data analytics, and other digital health analytics in the most optimal way possible. It will also enable the students to be ready to provide quality, safe, and evidence-informed care. With this information at hand, the informatics nurses would then be best placed to be involved in the delivery of desirable patient outcomes and error reduction, as has been illustrated in the paper. Secondly, the course will meet the workforce expectations and requirements of the NCLEX, which would ensure the graduates would be well prepared to work in a real clinical environment.

External Factor Impact on Curriculum Design

The other variables by which the nursing curriculum is to be superimposed are the stress factors which will indicate the impending nature of the nursing curriculum. In the meantime, the arrival of healthcare technology, such as telehealth, remote patient monitoring, and artificial intelligence, could be considered one of the influencing factors. The new technology has also flipped the care provider-nurse relationship, which has necessitated nurses learn a few of the easiest skills on how to work in digital health and informatics. This also implies that even the curricula being implemented in the schools concerned in the nursing discipline would have to be diversified, i.e., the students in the nursing schools would have known what technology is available to them in the field. Second, the need to combat the problem of overall population health management and data analytics is another homage to the needs of the population that the problem of informatics education covered in the mentioned case in turn warrants the inclusion of informatics education in the nursing programs.

The regulatory bodies, as well as the accrediting bodies, when developing the curriculum, also ensure that these are put in place. The curricula accepted in nursing applications should meet the necessities of a number of specific nursing groups, like the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) and Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE) (Welch and Smith, 2022). The two in AACN Essentials (2021) (and by proxy, push the respective programs to be restructured as well), quality improvement and data-driven care (the latter implicitly), can be linked to the latter, in turn. Together with the shortage of labour in the hospital, this will leave the hospitals with not much of a choice but to hire technology- and data-oriented nurses. All of these outside forces are the ones that cause the perceived need for the curricula to accommodate and make the nursing work contemporary, relevant, and flexible to the demands of the profession.

Internal Collaboration Framework for Successful Curriculum Design

It would also need to develop the right type of in-house consultation with the most important stakeholders in the institution in a bid to become a good curriculum designer (Kumar & Rewari, 2022). The creation of course materials, harmonization of course learning outcomes, and the curriculum, respectively, with the academic and professional accreditation standards, heavily depend on the faculty. Curriculum committees are also involved in other curriculum activities, such as curriculum revision and curriculum approval, which would involve aligning all the institutions’ programs to institutional goals and accreditation standards. No one can replace the simulation lab coordinators since learning activities that have been tested to work in the simulation lab are transferred to the context where learning in clinical and technical skills is practiced.

The leader(s) of the stakeholders group will also be the heads of the chain of command of stakeholders group (that will predetermine the overall direction of changes proposed in the curriculum): The directors of the programmes in the group (e.g. heads of the deans) will be the casters of the correspondence of the planned changes in the curriculum with the mission/ goals of the institution. When a quality or coherent curriculum is also being developed, the centralization of activities of staff members throughout the organization (e.g., regular staff meetings) turns out to be beneficial (Brown et al., 2023). In addition to this, the element of decision-making on the basis of data is also linked with the level of reverence for the fruitfulness of the curriculum. Student performance, course reviews, and NCLEX pass rates provide them with an indicator as to which areas they will work to make this curriculum even better.

Topical Outline for Course

Some of the most difficult-to-respond-to questions within the scope of the existing nursing practice, along with the course in Advanced Nursing Informatics, will make up the course Digital Health. They have blazed their path towards both clinical decision support systems and electronic health records and health informatics. Those students will also be introduced to data analytics and how it can be provided to the students so that they can assist them in providing improved patient outcomes. The rest involve patient-centered remote follow-ups and AI in treatment and as a component of the telehealth approach. The privacy or confidentiality of the patients, e.g., the HIPAA regulations, will be part of the course. At the end of the training, the students will have been subjected to simulation-based training in a way that they will be able to apply concepts of informatics into real-life clinical scenarios. They will serve as their subjects, and this will not only allow the students to learn theoretical knowledge, but also practical knowledge as well.

• Topics Link to Other Courses

Courses that could be co-morbid with the BSN current curriculum would be the ones to be added to the current curriculum. Since there might be an opportunity to incorporate it into NURS 4040: Evidence-Based Practice and Research, it will be free to access the information and borrow it to analyze it and transfer it to a sample clinic. It also corresponds to NURS 4030: Nursing Leadership and Management since the students are taught how they can utilize the data to arrive at their own decision in the organization and make a difference. Knowledge acquired about theories, as the students will be reporting throughout the informatics, will be applied to the clinical lessons, patient data, and EHR data analysis. The strand of prior knowledge (competence-based) would be rinsed off and swamped back up to the high end and application of that bit of knowledge to the clinical portion. The new course will not only result in enhanced effectiveness, but also compatibility of the overall curriculum, as the other courses will interface with this course.

Institutional Mission, Philosophy, and Framework’s Impact on Curriculum Design

Theoretical framework/ philosophy of the institution and mission of the institution – a lot of the design of the curriculum is influenced by this. The U. of Pittsburgh School of Nursing is a pioneer in the whole essence of patient-centered care and has incorporated this in its courses. This course will support the students in using the technology to help them improve patient outcomes, as it will be an informatics course. Team Members: Analytics Data analytics, electronic equipment has been employed in helping towards the creation of the philosophy of evidence-based practice of this program. To ensure that their students can practice the competencies, they will be taught based on the AACN Essentials (2021) model (Vortman et al., 2024). Cultural diversity, equity, and inclusion have also been taught to the students, as they can now work with new populations and manipulate the two sides of the data to help decrease health disparities. From them, we can map them regarding institutional standards and the standards of a profession, and the type of curriculum.

Types of Collaboration Needed by Internal and External Stakeholders

The outside stakeholders will be involved in curriculum development to arrive at an effective curriculum along with the inside stakeholders. These internal stakeholders will involve people who will be part of the academic leaders, Curriculum committee(s), and making this course a reality. The clinical partners will be the external stakeholders since the former will be able to train them in a way that would make them staffable. A bring-in of the technology professionals to set up coursework in which the informatics systems can be applied might also be an activity. A good curriculum (DelMonte et al., 2022) can be ensured by the accrediting agencies (CCNE). The employers and the healthcare organizations would have a few observations, as they too would help provide feedback, claiming whether or not the graduates are ready for real-life situations of practicing. This collaboration can be achieved via the advisory committee, partnering, and constant feedback to make sure that the curriculum is sensitive and effective.

• Consequences for not collaborating

The non-cooperation towards the curriculum development process might manifest itself in several undesirable results of the curriculum development process. In the absence of stakeholders’ input, therefore, the curriculum might be out of date and not fully able to be in line with the existing healthcare practices. This would also result in incompetent, ill-trained graduates who are not even able to self-assess to work in the clinics. Violations of the requirements of the professional standard can also have an impact on NCLEX pass rates and quality of the programs (Sheikoleslami et al., 2025). The graduates might also fail to get a job since they have not been trained as per the requirements of the job. This may potentially lead to some of their results being reverted back to the patient, and undermining the care delivery process to the patient in the long term. It would also put the program at a disadvantage, because they wouldn’t have had time to have a good jump start to complete their accreditation requirements. This results in the need for good collaboration to be successful and relevant.

Conclusion

The most challenging is the nursing education curriculum that must be highly planned, supplement enriched as well as must be in sync with the needs of the profession. Among the changes, the most notable should be the innovations of the new step, Nursing Informatics and Digital Health, as the current course in educating BSN is practically like an empty ship in terms of technological knowledge, and the experience of BSN in the professional field urgently needs an outburst of innovations. As concerns the determination of the curriculum design, the technological aspects as well as the demand for workforce are related, and at the same time there are external aspects of demands in the form of technological development, internal collaboration, and worthiness of an institution.