A Suggested Master Curriculum for Nurses

Ever since the recent impetus in the trend of nursing toward its long term goal of full professional stature, and the corollary trend of the recognition of a need for several levers of competence in nursing service, the writer has entertained the secret hope that some leader in nursing would explore the possibility of preserving the unity of nursing by developing some form of gradation of education for nurses. Both historically and by the very nature of the service, nursing is essentially a whole or a single field of service, with a diversity of function within that field. Because of this apparent unity of nursing the writer believed that there must be some way of preserving this unity which would be consistent with the current trends in the whole field of nursing and nursing education. Some recent developments in nursing which seem to confirm this notion of unity are: the general trend toward unity among the organized nurse groups, the difficulty of arriving at a logical job differentiation withing nursing, and the difficulty of separating the physical from the other more intangible aspects of nursing care. While musing over these developments and still hoping that some one would delve into this problem, the writer, rather unexpectedly, found herself confronted with the choice of a problem for investigation as a Master\u27s Thesis. Quite naturally then she turned to this still unexplored field. In this period of transition in nursing the present study is an attempt to explore a different direction that nursing education might take to reach its much coveted and rightful goal of full professional recognition for nurses. Fully aware of the difficulty as well as the novelty of this undertaking, the writer makes no claim to any special qualifications for the work except a keen interest in the future of nursing and some twenty years of active experience in the various phases of nursing education