This is a 46 credit graduate program with one innovative capstone project. It is designed for part-time attendance by working nurses.
Course Descriptions
NURS 500 — Confronting Issues in Contemporary Health Care Environments
Confronting Issues in Contemporary Health Care Environments examines Health care policy and politics in terms of contemporary issues related to advanced practice nursing, health care access, quality, and cost. The focus of this course is the critical analysis of health policy and legal issues.
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NURS 502 — Advanced Ethical Decision Making in Health Care
This is a course for master’s students who have already had some experience in ethical decision making, both academically in the classroom and in practice. This course will take an interdisciplinary focus, as ethical decision making at this level rarely ever is the decision of a single discipline. A variety of ethical topics will be analyzed from various perspective and depths in an effort to more broadly and more profoundly address the moral difficulties the advance practice practitioner in an interdisciplinary environment is likely to encounter.
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NURS 519 — Intro to Biostatistics
This is an introductory course which focuses on the fundamentals of biostatistics for health sciences graduate students. Excel-based and SPSS assignments will be used to supplement the content.
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NURS 523 — Methods for Health Research
The course is designed to provide professional graduate students with the skills necessary to evaluate the relationship between practice and published research. The course content includes an overview of research concepts, ethics in research, literature searching and reviews, quantitative and qualitative research methods and designs, and data collection, analysis, and interpretation techniques. An interdisciplinary team of faculty teaches the course using a problem solving approach.
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NURS 526 — Information, Innovation and Technology in Advanced Nursing Practice
This course is designed to provide an in-depth introduction to information systems and technologies that support practice and improve patient care and outcomes. Development of information management and technology skills (which meet the ANA Informatics Competencies) will be incorporated through out the course. Content is directed toward assisting the student in understand the relationships between patient care and complex information and data issues involved in clinical practice. Students will learn to use tools and strategies for building and managing information system components that require knowledge of informatics issues, standards, and relevant theories as well as evidence-based quality improvement strategies. This course also examines informatics issues within complex healthcare systems including organizational, professional, policy, ethical, social, cultural, economic, and legal factors.
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NURS 527 — Evidenced Based Approaches to Practice
This course focuses on using research to guide evidence-based practice. Communication, collaboration, and decision making skills from a multidisciplinary approach essential to collect, evaluate, and apply research to practice will be emphasized. During this course the student will learn to (1) conduct efficient, thorough searching of the research literature; (2) evaluate the quality of a body of research through an appraisal of design, methodology, and data analysis; (3) summarize the findings from an overall body of research; and (4) apply research evidence to issues of current nursing practice.
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NURS 669 — Professional Seminar for Advanced Nursing Practice
This required course is the application and integration of the role and competencies of the MSN prepared nurse with advanced nursing knowledge who will seek employment in a diversity of advanced practice roles. The roles of the MSN graduate as clinician, educator, researcher, expert, and leader are presented and explored. Interpretation and application of professional issues, practice issues, legislative issues, certification issues, insurance issues, legal issues, and ethical conflict resolution in advanced nursing practice are explored, and integrated into a model for interdisciplinary collaborative practice. Emphasis will be on preparing the graduating MSN prepared nurse for practice and of assuming new professional advanced practice roles. Last, all MSN graduates must establish competency in oral and written communication skills as a graduation outcome.
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NURS 586 — Innovation in Advanced Nursing Practice: Theory and Application
This course will explore the theoretical literature from diverse disciplines on how innovations are conceived, implemented particularly in nursing practice and how such innovations run their course and spawn other innovations. Theories of innovation and invention particularly applied to health care will be explored as well as disruptive innovations in health care, breakthrough dilemmas, innovation diffusion and the roles of mentoring and apprenticeship in innovation. The course will explore how innovation adds value to nursing practice through the development of greater efficiencies, lower cost, greater accuracy, greater safety, and expanded access to quality care. The course will also include how health care and nursing organizations and systems are structured to drive and support or to stifle innovation and intra/entrepreneurial processes. Finally, nursing/healthcare oriented exercises on how to “see things differently” and “differentiate between need and possibility” will be included.
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NURS 587 — Case Studies in Intra/Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Nursing
Using a case study model of great and bad ideas in nursing practice, education, and administration, students will explore some of the intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial experiments, innovations, and creative ventures in nursing, including both successes and failures. For example, students might analyze the rise and demise of “Patient Focused Care” as an organizer of nursing care delivery; the decline of the entry level Nursing Doctorate (ND); uses of technology to improve nursing care; and the successful implementation of the Associate Degree in Nursing; nurse practitioners as disruptive innovations in the delivery of primary care, and the rise of nurse managed health centers as cost effective alternatives to primary care delivery. These are but a few of the infinite number of nursing trends, practices and ideas, both good and bad, that could be examined using the Harvard Business School case study model.
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NURS 588 — The Nurse as Intra/Entrepreneur and Consultant
Using a business development model, each individual will create a business plan, from vision, through action plan, to opening day. Your idea could be for a new service for your organization or an idea for a service that you would provide as your own business. This course will provide practical skills on how a nurse can start a business, how to act as a consultant, and how to use advanced nursing knowledge to support either an independent or partially independent practice. Content will focus on needed traits and skills of intra/entrepreneur, business plan components, best business practices, inexpensive marketing strategies and “how” of starting and running a business.
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NURS 636 — Innovation Capstone Project I
This is the first of a three course sequence where under the direction of a nursing faculty mentor with direct expertise in the student’s planned project, students will spend three quarters developing and producing a capstone project. The faculty mentor may also require the student to obtain an additional non-faculty co-mentor in the area of the student’s project. The student will complete the project by submitting an extensive portfolio of the project’s conception, development, implementation and evaluation. The student will also submit the original work product, i.e. invention, innovation, design, paper, and submit a 30-minute videotaped presentation of the project. During this three quarter period, students will attend class online, both synchronously and asynchronously, to discuss the progress of their projects – both pitfalls and successes, and provide support to each other during this period of creative, but independent work.
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