Random Excerpts from NURS 340: Health Review for BCOU

Description

The Health Review course is designed to help you develop your knowledge base in nursing, biomedical and social sciences, and gain an overall view of the current Canadian health care system. Topics include anatomy, physiology, human development, pharmacology including geropharmacology, primary health care, the determinants of health, health promotion, community nursing, achieving and maintaining competence and nursing theory. This course will prepare you for entrance into the second course of the program, Nursing 350. You must spend a minimum of six to eight weeks in this course. To complete the course, you must successfully complete all the assignments and a final examination. You may take this course without going on to NURS 350 for credit of 100 hours of continuing education to maintain practicing registration with the RNABC. NURS 340 is a self-study course at home and has no clinical component. Tutor support is provided.

Objectives

The Health Review course will help you prepare to enter the Nursing Update course. By the end of Health Review you will be able to:

• Analyse the changes occurring in Canadian health care and nursing practice, and determine methods for keeping current in one's practice of nursing.
• Integrate nursing theory into a systematic problem-solving process that includes critical thinking, reflection, assessing, planning, implementing, and evaluating.
• Apply knowledge of the determinants of health and principles of health promotion and disease prevention toward promoting and maintaining health.
• Apply knowledge of human structure and functioning toward cultivating self-caring and promoting and maintaining health.
• Draw on pharmacology information in order to administer medications knowledgeably.
• Administer medications in a legal, accurate, responsible, and systematic manner, using the nursing process.
• Apply knowledge of basic pharmacology and safe administration of medications to older adult clients.

 

Outcomes of This Module

 

The Module includes two instructional units. By completing both units successfully, you will be able to:

 

¨      Analyze the changes occurring in Canadian health care and nursing practice, and determine methods for keeping current in one’s practice of nursing.

 

¨      Integrate nursing theory into a systematic problem-solving process that includes critical thinking, reflection, assessing, planning, implementing, and evaluating.

 

1.      Read “Primary Health Care” in Primary Health Care: A Nursing Perspective (2003, RNABC), pages 4 – 24.

 

2.      Read “Primary Health Care in Transition?” in Health Care in Canada (2003, CIHI), pages 33 - 42.

 

3.      Primary health care addresses the main health problems of a community, providing “promotive, preventive, curative and rehabilitative services accordingly” (WHO, Declaration of Alma Ata, 1978). As you read in the quote (in text box above), the RNABC supports the idea of community health centres as a core service for providing primary health care. Write a one paragraph description of an ideal community health centre for your local community, emphasizing the role of nurses within the centre.

 

In this section you will learn about a few of these changes including:

·        the move to evidenced-based practice

·         entry to practice changes for new registered nurses

·        the changing role of the nurse including advanced practice nursing

·         information technology in health care and nursing informatics

·         the need for primary health care nursing, including public health and home care nursing practice.

 

Learning Activity A1.2e – Information Technology and Nursing Informatics

Another way in which our changing society is affecting the practice of nursing is in the “information explosion” in nursing knowledge. This is reflected in the constantly increasing number of journals being indexed and in the development of online resources (resources that one can access by means of computer communication). It is also reflected in the increasing integration of computer technology into nursing practice, education, research and administration. This integration is called “Nursing Informatics” which is the combination of nursing, information and computer science.

 

CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS
Skill	Examples from Competencies
Interpretation – the ability to understand and identify problems
Analysis – the ability to examine, organize, classify, categorize, and prioritize
Evaluation – the ability to assess importance, credibility, and sources
Inference – the ability to draw conclusions based on the evidence
Explanation – the ability to explain the assumptions that led to a conclusion
Self-regulation – the ability to self-examine and self-correct