Always innovating
Purdue earns national award for undergraduate curriculum
Written by Story by Stephanie Mouw
In recognition of its infusion of systems and quality improvement (QI) approaches into the undergraduate curriculum, the Purdue School of Nursing has received the 2015 American Association of Colleges of Nursing’s Innovations in Professional Nursing Education Award. This award recognizes a school’s ability to reimagine traditional nursing education models and lead programmatic change.
Systems engineering has been a part of the Purdue Doctor of Nursing Practice program since 2006. In 2010, the school began significantly revising the Bachelor of Nursing curriculum to more comprehensively embrace systems thinking and QI — approaches that aim to improve health care services and patient outcomes.
“Our students leave here with a very good working knowledge of QI because they have participated in real-world projects at multiple intervals throughout the curriculum,” says Jane Kirkpatrick, associate professor and head of the School of Nursing.
Though many schools offer a single QI course, Purdue offers a comprehensive QI curriculum. Starting in their freshman year, students are introduced to the QI process as well as the significance of QI for nurses, patients and the health care system. As sophomores, students are introduced to the Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control (DMAIC) framework that helps identify systems waste, gaps and problems. To employ this framework, students collaborate with practice partners to complete projects, such as developing a food allergy policy for a rural elementary school and redesigning patient flow throughout a community child wellness day clinic. Juniors, during their medical/surgical clinical experiences, complete data-driven QI projects, such as determining what obstacles exist to changing IV tubes and conducting a root cause analysis of catheter-associated UTIs. Before graduating, nursing students complete the Senior Nursing Leadership course and use Lean QI methodology to solve complex problems, while also developing leadership and team skills. Senior year projects include designing patient health care portals for a rural community’s diverse patient population as well as developing a protocol for customizable alarm settings to reduce alarm fatigue.
The systems and QI approach builds competency across the curriculum, offers graduates a broadened scope of foundational knowledge, and promotes the development of team skills through active learning and interprofessional experiences, such as annual leadership conferences.
The school’s curricular advancements were informed by the Institute of Medicine’s Future of Nursing report, the Carnegie Foundation report and the Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice, Kirkpatrick says.
“Graduates come out of the program confident in understanding the demand for and method of QI,” she says. “They will be contributors to their organizations right away — employers are really excited about these students.”
Faculty — 10 of whom are Lean Six Sigma yellow belt certified — have been instrumental in re-envisioning the curriculum to fully match nurses’ growing professional requirements in today’s evolving health care context. The school also has an industrial engineer on faculty who has helped incorporate this new knowledge into the coursework.
“The award we received is a wonderful external acknowledgment of what our faculty have accomplished in terms of ensuring that Purdue nursing graduates are at the cutting edge of health care,” Kirkpatrick says.
In addition to faculty support, the program’s interprofessional practice partner collaboration allows students to better understand the relevance and significance of systems and QI skills. Feedback from these partners has shown the impact of QI-skilled nurses on meeting national quality standards, increasing interprofessional team collaboration, and — by having nurses serve as change agents and leaders — improvement of overall viability and sustainability. The Purdue School of Nursing now has a waiting list of practice partners who wish to collaborate with students on QI projects.
The Innovations in Professional Nursing Education Award is given annually to schools in four institutional categories and includes a prize of $1,000.