Nursing Care of the Patient in Pain (NURS:3737)

Nursing 3737 is an asynchronous, online interdisciplinary course that incorporates practical, experiential, and collaborative activities and assignments to guide professional healthcare students in providing quality care to all patients. Since Spring 2017, this course has undergone major revisions to align with core competencies for pain education in pre-licensure students and best practices in cutting-edge pain care. The first major changes occurred in late spring 2017 when the College of Nursing and Iowa Board of Nursing approved revisions to the course title, pre-requisites, requirements, recommendations, course description, core concepts, and course objectives. These changes were in response to an increasing need for evidence-based pain education that prepare students to be agents of change in implementing the Institute of Medicine’s call to transform how pain is viewed/perceived, assessed, treated, and evaluated.. Prior to Fall 2017, this course was limited to students enrolled in the College of Nursing (i.e., traditional BSN, RN-BSN, DNP, and PhD), but is now open to students from other professional health colleges at the University of Iowa (UI). In terms of curricular changes, the course has been re-designed based on the interprofessional core competencies for pain management (Fishman et al., 2013) and integrates the NIH Pain Consortium’s Centers of Excellence in Pain Education (CoEPE) interactive self-paced learning modules. As a result, there is a greater focus on mechanisms of pain, implementation of best practices, clinical practice guidelines, changing negative attitudes toward pain and people in pain, cultural implications, and safe opioid use.

The course is currently taught by a previous T32 predoctoral fellow, Staja Booker, who is a now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Florida. Nurs 3737 has received comparable or higher student evaluation scores when compared to College of Nursing and UI Division of Continuing Education (DCE) since Fall 2016. Additional modifications are planned to improve efficiency and design to reflect best practices in online pedagogy.