Creighton University's Path to Competency-Based Education

Speaker: Becky Davis, DNP, RN, Assistant Professor, Creighton University College of Nursing

Becky Davis, DNP, RN: Hi! My name is Becky Davis and I am located here in the midwest at Creighton Nebraska in Omaha. Our grant, however, will include working with students and implementing CBE on all three of our campuses: Omaha, Grand Island, which is in Central Nebraska, and in Phoenix. The other thing I wanted to preface my comments about is that our grant will be implemented with our accelerated BSN program. To get started, we began our mapping process, which went fairly well. We included a lot of people hoping to get a lot of people engaged and energized about the process. We completed the mapping for our first - the domains that we intend to be working on for the grant. We realized we had much more to do, but yet we were appreciative of the work that our College of Nursing had been doing prior to us getting the grant. So, so far so good with that process. We also created some working groups. One is a core team of the project director, our AACN champion, and our major practice partner. Another was an internal stakeholder group, which is people from all three campuses. Also leadership, also key staff members to be meeting at intervals that we're updating on our progress. The third was our really hard work group for this summer, which is made up of primarily population health faculty, and we've been working on those new teaching and learning strategies. We also did some work on our staff development side. We created some new tools, if you will, for our new faculty and any special faculty that are coming on board, and will be with us for our implementation. We did hold some formal and informal faculty development sessions. We had a watch party and watched some of the videos from the AACN website and shared resources, that kind of thing. And we also work to really pull in all of our internal resources here at Creighton, one of which obviously the library, our IT resources, all those things that really are supporting our work as we go forward.

Becky Davis, DNP, RN: Lessons learned. Oh, there are so many, right? And so many more to learn. But, a few that I wanted to share with you were probably just in general as you begin your process and work on all of the things that are related to CBE. Try and inform everyone that you can about the work that you're doing. Engage people often, frequently along the road and involve as many as you can. Even though it's challenging, we are, you know, clearly better together. So another lesson learned is that we really wanted to make sure that we kept all of our leadership involved, especially with the three campuses. So we created that internal stakeholders meeting that is just done on an every few weeks basis just as an update as to what's going on and what we are hoping to do. And it's been really helpful, because oftentimes we'll get a lot more information on how we might proceed, right? Or how processes work. So that's been helpful. We, in our mapping process, tried to as I said, include many people. But one of the the key things was it didn't...even though we are mapping to only two domains, we included all of the course leaders and really found that there were things in every course that engaged with the two domains that we were looking to map. Our pops faculty group, which has done the work this summer about a population health teaching and learning strategies, we really, I thought we were going to just get going, and things would move really quickly. However, we needed to establish some things ourselves. And that meant taking the time to get to know each other and our stories because as I said, we work on three different campuses. And so that was part of our process, took a little more time than we thought. But then, as we came together, we were able to problem solve, we were able to anticipate, and we're really generating some great new ideas, and looking forward to the process. We also had to come to some realistic realizations if you will. We're not gonna be able to accomplish, accomplish everything all at once, but we are prepared to perhaps get the trail started, and then help others get on the path. And I think the other key thing about lessons learned is that you really have to take every opportunity to learn what you can about CBE, and think about the learners that you're going to have in your programs as you create and deliver new design.

Becky Davis, DNP, RN: In addition to our population health domain, we collectively chose Domain Six, which is interprofessional partnerships. And the rationale for this was because Creighton has a longstanding, well established IPE focus, and it has been along that journey, all of our students have IPE education and focus, and it touches every one of our health profession students at Creighton. So because of the three campuses, we really wanted to have one overarching partner and that's why we chose CIPER. But along the way, we also realized that we were pretty happy with our choice, because CIPER has strong connections, always had connections with the College of Nursing. Our students were already participating, and we could already see the benefit. And so we really want to highlight and include anything we can on interprofessional partnerships, and we felt this was really the way to go.

Becky Davis, DNP, RN: Practice partners have always been integral to the work we do in community, population, public health, community clinical, right? But because we have this overarching practice partner, it's been really, really amazing, quite honestly, to be able to work alongside our CIPER Coordinator, which is our internal word for our, our practice partner. And because of that, we've been able to take a second look at how our curriculum is being implemented and evaluated, because they were participating in some ways with the curriculum already, and over time, the collective work that we are doing has potential to be shared wider throughout our Creighton health professional community, and actually may involve more health profession students in the competencies. A challenging part because of the three geographies where our campuses are is to engage our other community partners that have of course, been important partners where our students have these wonderful experiences. And so one of the things that we are hoping to do is to create at least some way of communication where we engage our community agency partners from all three communities, perhaps through a focus group, an advisory meeting, that type of thing, we really hope to kind of move that forward as our grant progresses, because it's important that they be stakeholders, right, or partners with us to be able to deliver the type of education that in turn will help support the populations that they serve, and quite honestly improve the education for our students as well. And so we're looking to make that a lot more collaborative, and we value their guidance, so we're looking forward to having those conversations with them.

Becky Davis, DNP, RN: For this question, I really do have three main things that I wanted to share as we move to CBE. I think along with my colleagues, that we'll be able to provide a framework and use emerging evidence then to design these creative teaching and learning strategies across all of our campuses that engages our students in an authentic way. Additionally, we can use these novel tools to capture data on student assessment. We're looking to do that not just better but with more depth and to provide more formative and summative evaluation for our students so that they feel like they are an active part of the process always and every time we are in clinical together. And then finally, we want to enhance and elevate. I believe we can. Population health and interprofessional partnerships through faculty development, through linkages to our foundational concepts throughout the curriculum, I think it makes perfect sense for us all to have more understanding of the broad and very rich fabric of nursing.

Becky Davis, DNP, RN: You know, when people ask me, I do tell them, it's really exciting to be part of this work. And really, I think I say that because I've really enjoyed the collaborative collegial work that we're doing together in designing the CBE strategies in our two domains. I can't wait to see how it unfolds for the remainder of the domains throughout our curriculum. I realize that we are recognizing strengths in each other and different skills that we bring to the table among our team being part of the grand has given us reason to take that deeper dive that we needed to in competency-based education. We've learned so much that we're super excited to see how it works for our students in our clinical setting. The other exciting part is being able to bring our three campus team together, even more together than we really strived, that we've been able to do in the past. But this provides us a really important common goal. And in speaking to our practice partner, we're just really excited to engage in this in-depth look that might be able to help us do competency-based education for students across all professions. And to have that as another common goal.