Faculty Development on the Use of a Clinical Judgment Model in the Pre-licensure Nursing Curriculum

Clinical judgment is an essential component of safe nursing practice that pre-licensure nursing students should develop by graduation from accredited nursing programs. For novice nurses, the consequences of underdeveloped clinical judgment skills that do not meet the demands of clinical practice are serious. This theory-practice gap correlates with increased numbers of errors occurring during care delivery, resulting in poorer patient outcomes. From a student perspective, this problem correlates with lower first-time pass rates on the NCLEX licensing exam. For nurse educators, there are uncertainties about how to resolve this complex and costly problem, but faculty development is one evidence-based solution to explore. The purpose of this article is to describe a three-pronged quality improvement project consisting of: 1) a faculty development session to teach faculty to implement the National Council State Boards of Nursing's Clinical Judgment Model (CJM) in their courses; 2) the use of the Clinical Judgment Tool; and 3) the implementation of a faculty champion to sustain and maintain ongoing faculty momentum to foster clinical judgment. This article focuses on how faculty can develop their own CJM faculty development session and use a CJM across the course curriculum.