Bachelor of Science (Nursing) / Bachelor of Science (Nursing) (Honours)
NUS Common Curriculum for Health Professional Education
Programmes
NUS Common Curriculum for Health Professional Education
Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies enhances the integrated Bachelor of Science (Nursing) programme with an interdisciplinary common curriculum.
Starting from August 2023, NUS Nursing in collaboration with the NUS Medicine, Faculty of Dentistry, Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, and the Department of Pharmacy, will implement a new interdisciplinary common curriculum. This new Common Curriculum for Healthcare Professional Education has been carefully crafted to ensure that the learning outcomes are aligned with the future vision of healthcare with focus on preventive healthcare and facilitating ageing in place through the use of technology and analytics.
About 370 first-year students from NUS Nursing will join 500 first-year students from Medicine, Dentistry and Pharmacy (class size of 870 altogether). They will be taking five specially designed courses together, and they will collaborate across the four healthcare disciplines as part of their learning journey. The common curriculum, which is to be completed in the first two years of their candidature, will complement the existing Nursing programme.
This cross-disciplinary curriculum seeks to cultivate awareness of social issues, teamwork, communication, ethics and professionalism, digital literacy, and interprofessional education in the context of health and healthcare. In addition, the Common Curriculum aims to equip the students with collaborative skills to engage in population healthcare planning, delivery and evaluation. Lessons are conducted through blended learning with a mix of online and in-person classes, which will be customised to feature group as well as individual learning sessions such as case-based discussions, fireside chats and self-reflections.
Students will also engage in interdisciplinary experiential learning through the Longitudinal Patient Experience, where teams of students from various healthcare disciplines will visit patients in their homes and living environment continually for one year. This immersive learning journey provides students with opportunities to apply the concepts learnt in class to provide holistic care for their patients, and at the same time fosters empathy and resilience in the students.
“Effective multidisciplinary team working is essential to provide high-quality patient care. This requires healthcare workers to communicate with and understand one another’s roles and responsibilities. For healthcare professionals with different backgrounds to be grounded in team-based care delivery, they must first be provided with opportunities to learn with one another. The Common Curriculum for Health Professional Education provides our nursing students with an invaluable opportunity to learn with, from, and about dental, medical and pharmacy students.” Said Head of Department, Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies, Prof Liaw Sok Ying.
Please refer to Annex below for more information about the Common Curriculum.
In line with the emphasis on patient-centric and relationship-based healthcare in Singapore, NUS undergraduate students studying Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy will be able to gain deeper and broader knowledge and understanding of healthcare issues and challenges through a new cross-disciplinary common curriculum.
The new Common Curriculum for Healthcare Professional Education will apply social and behavioural determinants of health to social prescribing and planetary health; use data and digital literacy to enable population healthcare planning, delivery and evaluation; and strengthen interdisciplinary engagement as well as experiential learning.
The Common Curriculum comprises five pillars:
1. Social and Behavioural Determinants of Health (Year 1)
This pillar examines the influence of social and environmental factors on important health outcomes in the life course and across vulnerable groups, as well as how these factors affect lifestyle, preventive, and curative behaviours.
2. Professional Practice 1: The Foundations of Health Professionalism (Year 1)
Students will learn what makes a patient-centric healthcare professional through professional identity formation and communication skills. They will also gain an understanding of the legal and ethical principles underpinning the practice and delivery of health services.
3. Data Literacy for Healthcare (Year 1)
This pillar features components of evidence-based practice, and covers the principles of data analysis as well as decision-making under uncertainty which are relevant to clinical practice.
4. Professional Practice 2: Basic Skills in Health Professionalism (Year 2)
Students will delve deeper into the ethical challenges that commonly arise in clinical practice, health systems, and research, to acquire practical skills in ethical reasoning as well as working and communicating well in multidisciplinary teams.
5. Digital Literacy for Healthcare (Year 2)
This pillar explores skills such as computational thinking, data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in the healthcare context, and more.
Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies
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Yong Loo Lin School of medicine
Clinical Research Centre
Block MD11, level 2
10 Medical Drive
Singapore 117597 - 6516 7455
- nuradmissions@nus.edu.sg
