inPractice - Summer 2019 - 14

PA COLLEGE / FEATURE

B

Back when she was in middle school, Kali Dariychuk, BSN '19, was
treated for a serious illness over several months. That was 10 years
ago, but she still vividly remembers the nurses who worked with her.
"I was able to ask questions at every visit, and they always made me
comfortable," she says. "I thought that someday I wanted to make
the same kind of impact on people's lives."
Now Dariychuk will have that chance. In May, she was one of the 26
graduates in the first cohort of PA College's newest BSN program.
The college has long offered an RN-to-BSN program for practicing
nurses, but this program takes students directly to a bachelor's-level
nursing degree. The intensive program is designed to be completed
in just three years. It's the only Three-Year BSN program in the state
of Pennsylvania. (Students can also choose a four-year option, which
offers the same curriculum at a less
intense pace.)
Dolores "Dee" Minchhoff, DNP,
CRNP, RN, an associate professor
of nursing who serves as the BSN
program's director, says she was
excited and challenged by the chance
to help build a new degree program
from scratch. "We had to make choices
about how to design the curriculum,"
she says. "We went to conferences,
read the literature and talked to our
colleagues across the country."
In the end, Minchhoff and her partners
chose a model known as a concept-based
nursing curriculum. In this model, all of the
teaching is consciously structured around
a finite set of nursing concepts. In PA
College's case, there are 55 concepts. Rather
than drowning in an infinite sea of data
about thousands of diseases, medications
and procedures, nursing students are taught core concepts-from grief and loss
to cognitive alterations to evidence-based practice-that should prepare them
to be skilled and adaptable in any clinical setting.
"Traditional nursing education has really hit a point of content
saturation," says Jean Hershey, '79, DEd, RN, CNE, Associate Vice
President for Academic Affairs. "We can't just keep adding all of the
emerging drugs and procedures and never take anything away.
That's not sustainable. In a concept-based program, students are
taught about core concepts-things like inflammation or anxiety
or hypoxia-so that they can recognize and respond to them
[in a clinical setting], even if they aren't an expert in that patient's
specific diagnosis."
"This kind of approach helps students to become active learners," notes
Cheryl Grab, '77, EdD, RN, Dean of Nursing. With a solid foundation
in core concepts, she says, nurses can approach specific clinical situations by
critically thinking through decisions about how to provide the best client care.

14

PACOLLEGE.EDU

"Chock-full of Clinicals"
The concept-based course structure looks quite different from
traditional four-year BSN programs taught at many other institutions.
Rather than having discrete courses in, say, pediatric nursing or psychiatric
nursing, the PA College BSN program weaves concepts related to
pediatric and psychiatric nursing throughout the curriculum. The
program also sends students into clinical settings almost immediately,
rather than having them first complete long semesters of preparatory
classroom work-the norm in many other BSN programs.
"This program is chock-full of clinicals from the start," says Rebecca
Cox-Davenport, '96, PhD, RN, an associate professor of nursing who
returned to PA College to help launch the BSN program. "In typical
BSN programs, you don't take many
nursing courses during the first two
years. For the most part, you're
getting your math and science and
English classes done. But we offer
intensive nursing content and clinical
experiences from the first week."
Dariychuk says that the
concept-based model helped her
to organize the intense amount of
information she had to absorb during
the three years of the program. "This
semester, we've been focusing on
hospice and end-of-life care," she
says. "Some of the lessons have
centered on a concept of grief and
loss. We've learned about examples
from different conditions, like
Parkinson's and chronic kidney
disease, but we've centered our
learning on grief and loss."
Karen Lupfer, BSN '19, another member of the inaugural class, has
come to nursing as a second career, after working as an environmental
scientist earlier in her life. "At first, I had a hard time adjusting to
the concept-based approach," she says. "As a scientist, I'm used to
approaching everything very systematically, in terms of taxonomy
and nomenclature."
But as she got deeper into clinicals, Lupfer says, she came to see the
value of concept-mapping. "On a med-surg unit," she says, "patients
have such high acuity. They may have five or six different comorbidities.
You have to be able to think flexibly. If their potassium drops, you
have to be able to respond quickly with interventions that will keep
your patient safe. You can't start the shift thinking that you know
exactly what your plan for the day is. Being familiar with overarching
nursing concepts allows us to be able to constantly update our
priorities as we receive new information."
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