This issue of NUrSing coincides with Nurses’ Day. Taking this opportunity, I would like to wish all Nursing colleagues “Happy Nurses’ Day”. Thank you for your unwavering dedication towards advancing healthcare.
As the largest healthcare workforce, nurses are instrumental to the success of Singapore’s healthcare system. This is a role that will grow in importance in coming years as we look after the growing population of seniors—and educators like my colleagues and I are privileged to contribute towards the endeavour of keeping the Nursing profession energetic and sustainable through education.
Notably, the increasing pace of healthcare transformation and changing healthcare needs and demographics promise that the challenges and expectations awaiting each batch of our graduating students will be unique. That is why I applaud the balanced and well-heeded speech our alumna Faith Hwang gave at the Commencement. It is amazing and heartening to see another of our very successful alumna, Dr Karen Koh, whose Nursing career is so different, embracing similar values.
They are our role models. Their achievements evidence that if we equip our students with core Nursing clinical skills and supplement that with empathy, collaboration, critical thinking and strong mental resilience, we will set our students on course for productive Nursing careers. To enable this, we are taking a two-pronged approach—strengthening our existing formal curriculum and placing more emphasis on informal curriculum by making it more robust, accessible and measurable.
The common curriculum started in August 2023 was one attempt. One year in, we have heard much positive feedback. Particularly, the Longitudinal Patient Experience (LPE), strategically timed to happen before our first-year Nursing students’ clinical posting prepares them for their internship. Having their first patient interaction in a community rather than an institutional setting teaches them to see patients beyond their diseases and appreciate them for the people they are. The opportunity for our students to work alongside Medicine, Dentistry and Pharmacy students to care for a patient also enhances their understanding of their peers’ perspectives—critical for ensuring holistic and patient-centred care.
Complementary to that, we are taking a stepwise approach to embed NUSOne into our students’ learning journey. Starting with the introduction of personality profiling for Year 1 Nursing students, we hope to uncover their professional inclination early and match them to programmes that empower and support their overall growth. Next, we seek to bolster our line-up of Community Involvement Projects (CIPs) so that each of them offers distinct experiences and complementary exposure to the formal curriculum.
We will not stop at NUSOne. For example, when our Research Fellow Dr Darryl Ang mooted the idea of a resilience workshop series for final-year Nursing students two years ago, we saw an opportunity to strengthen our final-year students’ resilience before they go for their Transition-to-Professional Practice (TTP). Since its trial run, I-AM-WELL workshops are now incorporated as part of the TPP preparation for our final-year students. Additionally, we have expanded the series to include STRONG workshops targeted at Year 1 Nursing students. We plan to roll out resilience workshops for Year 2 and 3 students in due course.
NETNEP 2024, the 9th International Nurse Education Conference is less than 3 months away. Among others, we look forward to sharing our recent experience in piloting the blended-learning approach. We also hope to engage other educators on their thoughts about the use of technology such as ChatGPT or Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in Nursing education.
We recognise that technology will continue to transform the Nursing practice and education. That is why we choose to take a proactive approach towards leveraging tech to help us teach better and more effectively—for the good of our students, their future and the nation’s healthcare.
Prof Liaw Sok Ying
Head (NUS Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies)
