The Identification of Learning Needs by Means of Critical Events

Abstract

WITH the implementation of the revised curriculum of the Basic Degree Course(l), the month of March each year is used by students in the Fourth Year for independent experience in the practice of nursing. The purpose of this experience is Jean M. Wilson. An Overview of the New Basic Curriculum" "to give the student an opportunity to integrate and apply all or several aspects of the year's work or to further study and practise one aspect of nursing"(2). In what is intended as a highly individualized experience, each student develops objectives and plans in consultation with a faculty adviser; students are independent in the sense that they are not directly supervised by school staff. Eleven students in the Fourth Year in 1972-73 requested placement with family physicians for their independent experience in March, 1973. To meet these requests, preliminary discussions were held with the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto, and the City of Toronto Department of Public Health which seconds nursing staff to a number of private medical practices. From these discussions was developed a list of potential settings from which the assignments were arranged; these were negotiated directly with the doctors by the Faculty of Nursing, as are all clinical practice arrangements. Students then followed up the initial contact by making detailed arrangements with and interpreting their objectives to the doctors concerned (3).