Healthcare in Secure Environments: Leading a Collaborative for Forensic Nursing Education.

Atlantic Canada hosts six federal and 18 provincial correctional facilities distributed across the four provinces. All employ nurses and offer significant career opportunities, yet minimal content related to forensic nursing is provided in nursing curricula. Furthermore, there is a paucity of continuing educational offerings for Canadian forensic nurses. This article describes the series of events that brought the practice of forensic nursing to the forefront of provincial news media. Actions taken by nurses in academia and practice addressed the lack of educational opportunities for forensic nurses in Atlantic Canada. One of these actions, a Knowledge Forum, was held to nurture partnerships between nurse leaders responsible for healthcare in correctional services in New Brunswick and nurse educators. The idea was to connect nurse leaders responsible for healthcare in federal and provincial jurisdictions, community liaison nurses and nurse managers working in hospital-based forensic mental health assessment units, and nurse educators, to explore nursing practice within secure environments and the current educational needs of forensic nurses.

Educating nurses for the twenty-first century abilities-based outcomes and assessing student learning in the context of democratic professionalism.

This article describes recent work in implementing a framework of abilities-based learning outcomes and related practices for assessing student learning in a Canadian Baccalaureate nursing degree program. The authors describe steps in implementing an abilities-based paradigm for nursing education, and subsequently developing an assessment framework based on abilities-based learning outcomes. The discussion reviews theoretical and policy-level influences involved in this initiative. The curriculum work is also discussed in terms of current trends in higher education emphasizing the assessment of student learning. The discussion concludes by linking these efforts to recent calls for a paradigm shift in the preparation of professionals, noting how the assessment of student learning can contribute to democratic professional formation in nursing.

Discovering co-learning with students in distance education sites.

Distance education is promoted as an effective way to reach more students, but how effective are interactive learning strategies in distance nursing courses? The authors discuss how nursing students adjusted to distance technologies and became actively involved in creating an environment that enabled development of supportive co-learning relationships. Learner perspectives on teaching strategies, distance learning, and becoming nurses are described.