R.N. to B.S. - Courses

This course will introduce the student to caring theory, reflective practice, and whole person nursing practice. Students will learn about nursing history, contemporary issues impacting nursing and health care today, person well-being, lifelong learning, professional values, and communication in professional nursing practice. Interprofessional collaborative practice is introduced in this course.

This course will introduce the student to comprehensive assessment of individuals within a holistic framework.  Students will utilize the nursing history and physical examination as well as developmental, sexual, mental, cultural, and spiritual assessment.  Basic skills of inspection, palpation, percussion, and auscultation will be learned or reviewed.  Modification of comprehensive assessment for specific age will be explored.  Students will consider their development from a novice to an expert nurse and examine the development of nursing diagnosis and contemporary methods of applying nursing process through managed care.  Several theoretical frameworks will be introduced as the student considers his/her personal philosophy of nursing.  This course will include laboratory activities in addition to the online group work.

This course prepares nurses to engage in quality and safety initiatives in healthcare and practice settings.  Students use knowledge from biological sciences, social sciences, physical sciences, and humanities to develop skill in improving the quality and safety in health care delivery, ultimately improving health care outcomes for diverse individuals, groups and communities with consideration given to healthcare disparities.  Students will learn the value of systems thinking with a focus on teamwork and collaboration, quality improvement, safety, healthcare standards, and informatics for improving outcomes in health care settings.  Students will complete 16 hours of clinical practice experience.  A quality improvement project will be identified during this course as the foundation for the capstone project.

This course provides a foundational overview of evidence-based practice and the critical appraisal of best evidence literature. The course is designed to teach evidence-based practice skills that will enable the RN-BS student to conduct evaluations of existing literature related to improving care. Students learn to formulate clinical questions in an answerable format, search for and identify best evidence, and appraise that evidence for rigor and applicability to a practice problem. Basic principles of scientific inquiry, quantitative and qualitative research methods, research ethics, and protection of human subjects are introduced. Students will complete an eight-hour practice experience. The course will culminate with a review of the literature to support a quality improvement initiative as a foundation for the capstone project.

This course reinforces the pathophysiology of disease processes and pharmacological therapies. The course focuses on the physiological changes, clinical manifestations, and pharmacological therapies used to affect the disease process.  The course integrates anatomy, physiology, chemistry, microbiology, and pharmacology to provide a basis for study of diseases and pharmacotherapeutic agents with a focus on the application to clinical practice regarding medication administration and safety.  This course focuses on medications that are used in the care of individuals experiencing alterations in mobility, elimination, oxygenation, immunity, and metabolic systems.

This course will prepare nursing students with knowledge and skills to lead and manage care in a variety of healthcare settings.  An exploration of leadership theories, leader influence, team building, emotional intelligence, ethics, and healthy work culture are included.  The student will acquire multiple leadership skills such as decision making, delegation, conflict resolution, advocacy, performance appraisals and managing budgets.  The impact of healthcare policy and politics on health care is explored and discussed.  Students participate in a total of 16 hours of leadership practice experience and develop a plan for leading a practice change project in the practice setting.

Population Health is an eight-week time-shortened course with 2.5 credits of classroom learning, and 0.5 credits for clinical learning.  Population health includes community and public health nursing and all facets there within.  Community and public health nursing differ from acute-care settings in care and in both philosophy and scope.  In this course, students will focus on the role of the Baccalaureate-prepared nurse in community and public health settings.  Epidemiology and its application to community health will be examined and explored.  There will be opportunity to learn about families in the community/public health settings.  Opportunity is built into the course to enhance knowledge as the student applies the principles learned in class through self-study, community-based RN assessments, and the discovery of community agencies or resources within the community.

Students will complete 45 hours of clinical practice experience.  During this experience, students will synthesize the knowledge and competencies gained in the program to implement and evaluate an improvement project specific to a practice setting using an evidence-based approach.  The course will culminate in a scholarly presentation and portfolio to demonstrate the student’s ability to use evidence-based practice, performance improvement principles and leadership skills to effectively manage change in a healthcare environment.

This course is designed to foster knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the Humanities through literature and the arts. Students are encouraged to reflect on their own lives vis-à-vis issues raised in assigned prose and poetry, video and lecture material, and class discussion. A Judeo-Christian perspective provides a framework within which to examine personal experience in relation to the world in which we live.

Learning, both formal and informal, is a lifelong process that occurs in the workplace, the community, the church, the family, and the classroom.  This course introduces students to the field of adult education as they become familiar with the beliefs and assumptions that guide the practice of adult education within a philosophical framework.  Students will use the David Kolb model of experiential learning to analyze their learning and application within specific subject areas and will submit essays demonstrating learning for assessment for academic credit.

This course will introduce the student to some of the basic concepts of descriptive and inferential, including frequency distributions, graphs, numerical summaries, probability distributions, confidence intervals, one and two-sample hypothesis tests for means, correlation and regression, chi-square tests, and analysis of variance.

The central goal of this course is to provide students with the foundational knowledge to make informed judgments about the application of statistics in nursing research and its usefulness in meeting the wholistic needs of clients and advancing the profession of nursing.

This course will assist students to better understand their own values and the relationship of those values to professional activities. Topics covered include the most influential and useful theories of ethics and justice that can be applied to the students’ own lives and to the ethical situations and dilemmas that arise in the nursing profession. Students will engage in values clarification, create a personal system of ethics, learn a step-by-step ethical decision-making process, and apply these to a wide range of issues and conflicts that nurses encounter in clinical cases and other workplace situations.