WARWICK – Ninety-five percent of Community College of Rhode Island nursing graduates taking the National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses passed during the third quarter.
The graduates are the first to complete the college’s new nursing curriculum, which was implemented in fall 2016.
Hilary Jansson, dean of health and rehabilitative sciences at CCRI, said the curriculum was redesigned following the program’s last accreditation review. The process of the program’s recent accreditation provided an opportunity to identify areas of improvement for the nursing programs, including modernizing the curriculum, according to a statement from CCRI. The accreditation effort also uncovered a need for a more data-driven curriculum with more specific student learning outcomes, she said.
“Our NCLEX scores had been dropping. They were still acceptable but lower than they had been. Our curriculum needed to be upgraded,” said Jeanne McColl, assistant dean of nursing. “The NCLEX exam includes changes required by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing for current practice in nursing. Those changes were addressed in our new curriculum.”
The new curriculum includes more lecture time, which McColl said benefited students, noting faculty in the first cohort’s last semester were impressed by students’ critical thinking ability.
Jansson said the students’ last class is a capstone course in which they are paired with a registered nurse and experience a full range of a registered nurse’s responsibilities in patient care. “They are able to see a broader perspective of patient care,” she said.
Rob Borkowski is a PBN staff writer. Email him at Borkowski@PBN.com.
