"The extant system of nursing education is totally inadequate to meet the needs of society for nursing care."
Esther Lucille Brown, 1948 (Stokowski, 2011b)
Trends in Nursing Education
Trends in nursing education are keeping pace with those in the general field of adult education, but also include factors specific to nursing such as the rapidly changing health care environment. When I ‘googled’ trends in nursing education to see what was being said in the overall on-line world, I immediately found a promising hit – “Modern Trends in Nursing Education”. In the article the author states, “Nursing education is undergoing drastic changes. History repeating herself through a new social expression has kept consistently in step with the development and progress in related fields of life activity. The demand today for a different preparation for the nurse, general and professional, is a demand not of the idealist but of the times.” Sounds accurate enough. Then I looked at the date – 1936. It seems we have been discussing trends in nursing education since Florence Nightingale opened the first formal nursing school, the Nightingale Training School for Nurses, in 1859 (MGH, 2010). The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Click Read More to learn about my personal experience with flipping the classroom in a Saudi College of Nursing.