Nurse education

Nurse education consists in the theorical and practical training provided to nurses with the purpose to prepare them for their duties as nursing care professionals. This education is provided to nursing students by experienced nurses and other medical professionals who have qualified or experienced for educational tasks. Most countries offer nurse education courses that can be relevant to general nursing or to specialized areas including mental health nursing, pediatric nursing and post-operatory nursing. Courses leading to autonomous registration as a nurse typically last four years. Nurse education also provides post-qualification courses in specialist subjects within nursing.

Historical background
During recent decades, the emphasis on education has replaced the more practically focussed, but often ritualistic, training structure of conventional preparation. Nurse education integrates today a broader awareness of other disciplines allied to medicine, often involving inter-professional education, and the utilization of research when making clinical and managerial decisions. Orthodox training can be argued to have offered a more intense practical skills base, but emphasized the hand maiden relationship with the physician. This is now outmoded, and the impact of nurse education is to develop a confident, inquiring graduate who contributes to the care team as an equal. In some countries, not all qualification courses have graduate status. Traditionally, from the times prior to Florence Nightingale, nursing was seen as an apprenticeship, often undertaken in religious orders such as convents by young women, although there has always been a proportion of male nurses, especially in mental health services. In 1860 Nightingale set up the first nurse training school at St Thomas' Hospital, London. Nightingale's curriculum was largely base around nursing practice, with instruction focussed upon the need for hygiene and task competence. Her methods are reflected in her "Notes on Nursing", (1898).

Some other nurses at that time, notably Ethel Bedford-Fenwick, were in favor of formalized nursing registration and curriculum that were formally based in higher education and not within the confines of hospitals.

Nurse education in the United States has been conducted within university schools, although it is unclear who offered the first degree level program. So far as known Yale School of Nursing became the first autonomous school of nursing in the United States in 1923. In Europe the University of Edinburgh was the first European institution to offer a nursing degree in 1972.

Present aims
Among nurse educators, arguments continue about the ideal balance of practical preparation and the need to educate the future practitioner to manage healthcare and to have a broader view of the practice. To meet both requirements, nurse education aims to develop a lifelong learner who can adapt effectively to changes in both the theory and practice of nursing.