Creating Relevance and Credibility: New Approaches for Bioscience Education in Pre-registration Nursing Curriculum

Abstract

In Australia, biomedical scientists typically service teach bioscience to pre-registration nursing students. It has been reported that nursing students consider these bioscience subjects to be difficult causing anxiety, which potentially leads to surface learning approaches. Traditional assessments in bioscience teaching, such as multiple choice questions, do not foster the development of critical thinking skills for integrating the bioscience to their nursing practice. These difficulties led to a major revision of bioscience teaching within a nursing faculty at an Australian university. We developed a model for teaching bioscience with the purpose of restructuring the bioscience assessments to improve the connection between bioscience knowledge and clinical practice requirements, and to develop implement specific clinical sessions for biomedical lecturers to aid in their understanding of the relationship of bioscience to clinical practice. This was to ensure that bioscience teaching was aligned with the nursing faculty graduate attributes and registered nurses competencies for safe and competent practice. This paper will describe the process undertaken by the bioscience teaching team to address these difficulties and the development of an integrated model of bioscience and clinical teaching. We will describe clinical sessions for the biomedical lecturers, the new assessments and their relationship to clinical practice, and how these relate to the new model.