Nursing educators challenged with incorporating nursing informatics into their curriculum in accordance with new AACN Core Competencies for Professional Nursing Education got a jump start at a three-day Vanderbilt Informatics Summer Teaching Academy (VISTA) held at VUSN July 20-22.
The informatics immersion, led by nursing informatics experts, used AACN informatics essentials as a framework to provide attendees with concrete ways to embed informatics into their curricula.
Attendees learned to identify teaching strategies, develop content and create assessment measures to meet the new competencies. Senior Associate Dean for Nursing Informatics Patricia Sengstack, DNP’10, FAAN, FACMI, was one of the instructors for the conference.
“With the pervasiveness of technology in health care today, and the need for robust analytics, informatics concepts are no longer optional in nursing education,” Sengstack says. “They are now essential components to understand in the delivery of transformational care.”
Other VISTA instructors included Kelly Aldrich, DNP, FHIMSS, director of innovation, and Brenda Kulhanek, PhD, director of Vanderbilt’s Nursing Informatics specialty. As educators, the three have approximately a century of combined education experience.