Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Future of Nursing Education.

Nursing is the largest health profession, with nearly 4 million providers practicing across acute, primary, and public health care settings. In response to the pandemic, nursing schools halted on-site course delivery and redesigned programs to attenuate risks to students and faculty. Key challenges faced by schools included financial cutbacks, rapid increases in online learning technology, maintaining student academic progression, disruption to clinical learning opportunities, and meeting accreditation standards, while addressing the stress and loss experienced by faculty, staff, and students. Despite challenges, nursing organizations provided guidance for decision making, new learning resources, and faculty development opportunities. Schools of nursing leveraged their resources to redesign nursing curricula, strengthen partnerships for student clinical experiences, and address needs of the community. Nursing education will look different from its prepandemic profile in the future. Lessons learned during the pandemic point to gaps in nursing education, particularly related to disaster and public health preparedness, health equity, and technology. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing's new Essentials-standards for professional nursing education-were finalized during the pandemic and reflect these lessons. The need for nurse scientists to conduct emergency response research was made evident. The importance of strong academic-practice partnerships was highlighted for rapid communication, flexibility, and responses to dynamic environments. For the future, nursing education and practice must collaborate to ensure that students and practicing nurses are prepared to address emergencies and pandemics, as well as the needs of vulnerable populations.

Ethics and Well-Being: The Health Professions and the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on health professionals, adding to the moral suffering and burnout that existed prepandemic. The physical, psychological, and moral toll of the pandemic has threatened the well-being and integrity of clinicians. The narrative of self-sacrifice and heroism bolstered people early on but was not sustainable over time. For health professions students, the learning environment changed dramatically, limiting opportunities in direct patient care and raising concerns for meeting training requirements. Learners lost social connections and felt isolated while learning remotely, and they witnessed ethical tensions between patient-centered care and parallel obligations to public health. Worries about transmission of the virus and uncertainty about its management contributed to their moral suffering. Educators adjusted curricula to address the changing ethical landscape. Preparing learners for the realities of their future professional identities requires creation of interprofessional moral communities that provide support and help develop the moral agency and integrity of its members using experiential and relational learning methods. Investing in the well-being and resilience of clinicians, implementing the recommendations of the National Academy of Medicine, and engaging learners and faculty as cocreators of ethical practice have the potential to transform the learning environment. Faculty need to be trained as effective mentors to create safe spaces for exploring challenges and address moral adversity. Ethics education will need to expand to issues related to health systems science, social determinants of health, and public health, and the cultivation of moral sensitivity, character development, professional identity formation, and moral resilience.

Simulation and student learning: will NMC policy lead to lasting change?

Emeritus Professor Alan Glasper, from the University of Southampton, discusses a new initiative from the Nursing and Midwifery Council to increase clinical learning through simulation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The future of nurse education? Studying at the Open University in Scotland.

This article describes nurse education with the Open University in Scotland (OUiS). Although there are problems with nurse recruitment and retention across the UK, in Scotland the landscape is somewhat different, with greater support for students required in remote and rural areas. Despite these challenges, the OUiS continues to recruit to the commissioned numbers of places. OUiS nursing students are primarily health care support workers who are a key group within the health and social care workforce but historically have faced many challenges in developing clear career pathways into nursing. At the heart of the OU is the fundamental recognition of distance online pedagogy, complemented by work-based learning support by employers. Partnership working between the OU, employers and education commissioners is crucial to its success.

Global Health Education Amidst COVID-19: Disruptions and Opportunities.

This viewpoint examines the impact of COVID-19 travel bans and remote education on the global health education of students from high-income countries (HIC) and low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) and explores potential opportunities for strengthening global health education based upon more dispersed and equitable practices. Global health is unique in the opportunities it can offer to students during the pandemic if programs can manage and learn from the pandemic's many challenges. Global health educators can: shift to sustainable remote engagement and mobilize resources globally to facilitate this; collaborate with partners to support the efforts to deal with the current pandemic and to prepare for its next phases; partner in new ways with health care professional students and faculty from other countries; collaborate in research with partners in studies of pandemic related health disparities in any country; and document and examine the impact of the pandemic on health care workers and students in different global contexts. These strategies can help work around pandemic travel restrictions, overcome the limitations of existing inequitable models of engagement, and better position global health education and face future challenges while providing the needed support to LMIC partners to participate more equally.

COVID-19 experience in mainland China: Nursing lessons for the United States of America.

COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China, and began its worldwide journey. As the severity of the virus became known, the Chinese National Government mobilized resources, and their centralized management was critical to the containment of the epidemic. Healthcare agencies and providers were overwhelmed with patients, many of whom were critically ill and died. Nurses adapted to the work using personal protective equipment, but its initial scarcity contributed to stressful working conditions. Nurses in the United States can take several lessons from the experiences of their Chinese nurse colleagues, including the benefit of centralized management of the epidemic, the need for specialized treatment facilities, and the importance of a national stockpile of critical equipment and supplies. A fully funded United States Department of Health and Human Services Office of Pandemics and Emerging Threats is necessary. A nursing department within the office and a national mobilization plan to send nurses to support local efforts during a pandemic or other threat are likewise essential. Continuous training for nurses, especially caring for patients with infectious diseases in intensive care units, stress management, and how to comfort the dying, are also useful lessons.

COVID-19 pandemic effects on nursing education: looking through the lens of a developing country.

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the way things are done in walks of life including nursing education in both developing and developed countries. Nursing schools all over the world as well as in developing countries responded to the pandemic following the guidelines of the World Health Organisation and different countries specific guidelines regarding the pandemic. AIM: This reflective piece aims to describe the effect of COVID-19 on nursing education in developing countries. RESULT: Face-to-face teaching and learning were converted to virtual remote learning and clinical experiences suspended to protect the students from the pandemic. Specific but broader responses to the pandemic in the Caribbean and other developing countries have been shaped by financial, political and other contextual factors, especially the level of information technology infrastructure development, and the attendant inequities in access to such technology between the rural and urban areas. Internet accessibility, affordability and reliability in certain areas seem to negatively affect the delivery of nursing education during the COVID-19 lockdown. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING AND/OR HEALTH POLICY: The impact of COVID-19 on nursing education in the Caribbean and other parts of the world has shown that if adequate measures are put in place by the way of disaster preparedness and preplanned mitigation strategies, future crises like COVID-19 will have less impact on nursing education. Therefore, health policymakers and nursing regulatory bodies in the developing countries should put policies in place that will help in responding, coping and recovering quickly from future occurrences.