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Welcome to Insights in Nursing Episode 33

The show starts off with a brief introduction of the panelists on this week’s show. First on the panel is Terri Schmitt from nursestory.com who brought on some of her students to as panelists in this discussion. Next up was Teresa Herrin, a nurse who started off as a microbiologist then continued into a nursing career in 1994 with an ADN. Since 1996, Teresa has worked as an RN up until 2 years ago when her position required a higher degree of nursing education. Now at 56, she is currently pursuing to get her BSN degree. Finally, Kurt Harter, also one of Terri’s students, has been working at a single health care institution for 25 years. He started to take his BSN degree a few years after being an RN as an ADN but stopped after having children. He then went back to continue his BSN and says that the education then and now had a lot of changes and it had been a different learning curve for him.

Online vs. Seated Classes

Right after the brief introduction, they moved on to talking about the difference of studying nursing then and now as Kurt mentioned that a lot has changed in the mode of instruction from traditional seated classes to studying online over the internet. Terri, being their instructor mentioned three advantages of online classes as opposed to traditional seated classes which was the ability to pull in students that normally wouldn’t have been able to come back to school, the online students being able to learn how to navigate technology better and finally,communicating and working with each other in networks that would unlikely happen in a seated class.

Nursing and Technology

The podmedic then brought up his concern about most of the population of the nursing profession being not as savvy on online resources as opposed to other health care professions. Nurses being too tired from work when they got home, different institutions with different technologies,  and the average age of nurses and the age group of those comfortable with technology not being on the same level were some of the comments that came up. Terri added that the nursing education has been slow to catch up with the use of technology with seated classes still being held. The ILN reports have been trying to change this but with the average age of nurse educators being higher compared to nurses on floor, they should also adapt to the technology. As to the application of an IT course to nursing practice, the two students share their take from computerized documentation to patient needs communicated via technology.

BSN in 10

The discussion moves on into the paper that came out about ADN graduates having to get a BSN degree within 10 years after being RNs. A question that came up was if RN wouldn’t get a BSN in 10 years, does that mean they are not allowed to be bedside nurses anymore?  Issues such as the financial resources, the time that would be taken and the difficulty of convincing someone or a good reason why a nurse should pursue a BSN also were talked about.

Terri mentioned a paper on a research that was done in a post-op unit which shows that part of the increased survival rates was related to the education level of the nurse caring for the patient. It also shows that nurses with a higher degree of education tend to stay at the bedside longer. Though the reason has not thoroughly been established, studies are still going on with different variables being considered.

Adult learners and BSN

The ages between ADN nurses who go back to school to get their BSN and the students who got into BSN straight away has a large gap. As adult learners themselves, Teresa and Kurt share their experiences and thoughts on the hurdles they had to face upon coming back to nursing school and what they did to overcome those challenges. They also shared which parts of the BSN course they were and were not able to apply into the workplace as well as the application of evidence-based nursing.

Concluding the show, the panelists give their advice to those out there who are thinking of advancing their nursing degree.

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Thanks to our Sponsors!

Medsyntrix.com for unique online CE for that continuing education that all nurses need! www.MedSyntrix.com

and

Bandwidth sponsor AllNurses.com, the Largest online community for nurses. Continue the discussions there!

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Join us!

On the panel this week:

Terri Schmitt from NurseStory.com and on Twitter @onlinenursing.

Kurt Harter

Teresa Herrin

and host Jamie Davis, the Podmedic, RN, NREMTP, BA, AAS managing director of the ProMed Network and host of the Nursing Show and MedicCast weekly programs.

Join us as we delve in to our week’s topic.

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Contact Insights in Nursing

Do you have a question or a comment for our nurse panelists for this or any other episode of Insights in Nursing? Email us at InsightsInNursing@GMail.comwith your comments on this episode, suggestions for the show or future episodes or just to tell about what you think is important right now for you as a nurse!

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