Curriculum revision: product innovation for quality outcomes

The education of any professional discipline rests on a curricular foundation that reflects the discipline's theory and knowledge bases, practice patterns, and unique skills. In addition, professional health care education must respond to and reflect changes in technology, societal definitions of health and wellness, and broad social issues such as access to care, health care funding, and changing patient demographics. These issues are interwoven with efforts to also provide high-quality education with positive learning outcomes. In this article, the authors describe a school of nursing's efforts to revise its curriculum to reflect a professional shift in focus to community-based nursing practice and the goals of the federal health goals outlined in Healthy People 2010. The revision also served as the starting point for a change in the process through which the college will seek accreditation in the future; this process-Academic Quality Improvement Program-requires institutions of higher learning to use a continuous quality model as its base.