WSCC Vision Statement
Our vision is to be one of America’s premier community colleges, driven by a passion for:
- Assuring student success
- Serving our entire community, and
- Pursuing greatness
WSCC PN & ADN Program Vision Statement
The WSCC School of Nursing is committed to professional education programs that provide our community with critically thinking, competent, and caring nurses who are leaders in a rapidly changing healthcare environment.
WSCC Mission Statement
West Shore Community College’s mission is to make our community a better place in which to learn, live, work, and prosper.
WSCC PN & ADN Program Mission Statement
The mission of the Nursing program is to create an engaging and evidence-based learning environment resulting in accountable, compassionate nurses who function professionally and collaboratively in the rapidly changing healthcare industry.
WSCC Core Values
West Shore Community College values people first. As we pursue greatness, we are guided by these values:
Learning: Creating opportunities for gaining core abilities, workplace skills, and lifelong personal growth.
Integrity: Honoring our commitments and promises with openness and mutual respect.
Excellence: Striving for greatness through a positive attitude and continuous improvement.
Inclusiveness: Building community through teamwork, collaboration and outreach.
Creativity: Opening our minds and the minds of our students to infinite possibilities.
WSCC PN & ADN Program Core Values
The WSCC PN and ADN programs value excellence in nursing education to promote building a strong, diverse nursing workforce to advance the health of our community which are guided by the following core values:
Learning: The purposeful acquisition of new knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and skills by providing the learner a series of intentional directed activities (Bastable, 2014, p. 337).
Integrity: Respecting the dignity and moral wholeness of every person without conditions or limitation. (NLN, 2010, p. 13)
Excellence: Creating and implementing transformative strategies with ingenuity. (NLN, 2010, p. 12)
Diversity: Affirming the uniqueness of and differences among persons, ideas, values, and ethnicities. (NLN, 2010, p. 12)
Caring: Promoting health, healing, and hope in response to the human condition. (NLN, 2010, p. 11)
WSCC Core Abilities
According to West Shore Community College, core abilities are “institution-wide learning outcomes that prepare students for success in life, school, and work”. Core abilities are considered important cross-disciplinary skills all students should possess at graduation. West Shore Community College has identified three core abilities that impact success in each course, the workplace, and throughout students’ lives. The three core abilities established by West Shore Community College are:
- Communication
- Critical Thinking
- Professionalism
The college believes improving students’ abilities to communicate, think critically, and act professionally need to be given attention in every class, in ways appropriate to each discipline. The Nursing Program strives to incorporate these core abilities into each Nursing course. The core abilities align well with the newly proposed Program Outcomes.
The following is a comparison of our current Program Learning Outcomes to our proposed new Program Learning Outcomes for each level. At this point, the WSCC Nursing Program only has Program Learning Outcomes for the ADN program and so the current PN and ADN Program Learning Outcomes are identical. Each proposed outcome is linked to a part of our conceptual framework and to one of the college’s core abilities:
WSCC PN & ADN Program Core Abilities
The Nursing Program acknowledges the College’s Core Abilities and understands their importance within the profession of Nursing. As such, faculty integrates communication, critical thinking, and professionalism throughout the program.
Nursing Philosophy
The philosophy of West Shore Community College Nursing Program flows from the mission of the school and supports the concepts of clinical judgment, excellence in education, holistic care, professionalism, evidence-based practice, and lifelong learning. The philosophy serves to unite these concepts:
Nursing is the protection, promotion, and optimization of health and abilities, prevention of illness and injury, alleviation of suffering through the diagnosis and treatment of human response, and advocacy in the care of individuals, families, communities, and populations (ANA, 2012). Nursing functions independently and in teams, utilizing evidence-based care and shared decision making to achieve quality patient care.
Person: Each person is a holistic being composed of physiological, psychosocial, spiritual, and intellectual dimensions, including inherent dignity and worth. As such, the patient is the source of control and a full partner in their care. As a member of a family, community, and culture, each person will be care for based on respect for patient preferences, values and needs.
Environment is defined by the patient, family and nurse in each situation. Physical, technological, interpersonal, emotional, spiritual, political, cultural, economic, and other factors influence the environment of care. Nurses seek to create a safe, professional, caring/healing environment for their patients in every nurse-patient encounter. Nurses utilize quality improvement to monitor outcomes and use improvement methods to improve the quality and safety of healthcare systems and their own care.
Wellness is more than the absence of disease or disability. Wellness encompasses the entities of disease prevention, promotion, maintenance, and restoration. Healthy lifestyle, risk reduction, genetics, communities and other factors influence the health of individuals. It is possible for persons to consider themselves well regardless of their external health when they factor in their capacity to adapt and respond and live fully within their own challenges.
Teaching is the concept of imparting knowledge through a series of directed activities. It consists of a conscious, deliberate set of actions that help individuals gain new knowledge, change attitudes, adopt new behaviors, or perform new skills (Billings and Halstead, 2012).
Learning is the purposeful acquisition of new knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and skills through an experience or external stimulus. Learning can occur within the three domains of either cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains of learning. (Bastable, 2014).
WSCC Nursing Conceptual Framework
The conceptual framework of the WSCC Nursing Program is derived from the above philosophy and is based on the four pillars of the National League for Nursing:
- Human Flourishing - Promote the dignity, integrity, self-determination, and personal growth of diverse patients, their families, and oneself to provide individualized, culturally appropriate, relationship-centered nursing care.
- Professional Identity - Articulate a unique role as a member of the health care team, committed to evidence-based practice, caring, advocacy, and safe quality care, to provide optimal health care for diverse patients and their families.
- Nursing Judgment - Make judgments in practice, substantiated with evidence, that integrate nursing science in the provision of safe, quality care for diverse patients and their families in collaboration with the health care team.
- Spirit of Inquiry - By collaborating with health care team members, utilize evidence, tradition, and patient preferences in predictable patient care situations to promote optimal health status.