Overview
Nursing 438: Trends and Issues in Nursing and Health Systems introduces students to current developments and challenges in nursing and health systems. The course explores how these trends are experienced through personal values and examines them from social, political, organizational, and legal/ethical perspectives. It also examines health care politics, within the Canadian system, and critically analyzes how current issues affect the nursing profession and practice.
Outline
Nursing 438: Trends and Issues in Nursing and Health Systems
- Unit 1 Trends, Issues, and My Values
- Unit 1A: A Backgrounder on Trends and Issues in Canadian Health Care
- Unit 1B: Trends in Nursing
- Unit 1C: Issues in Nursing
- Unit 1D: Your Values
- Unit 1E: Pulling it All Together: Assignment 1
- Unit 2 Talking About Health Literacy: Print, Media, and Artificial Intelligence
- Unit 2A: Fallacies in the Information we Read, See, and Hear
- Unit 2B: Evaluating Web-Based Health Information
- Unit 2C: Developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Literacy
- Unit 2D: Thinking Critically About AI
- Unit 2E: Ethics and AI
- Unit 2F: Pulling it All Together: Assignment 2
- Unit 3 Current Trends and Issues at the Intersection of Nursing, Politics, and Health Care
- Unit 3A: The Intersection of Health, Politics, and Nursing in Canada: Who’s Who and What Do They Do?
- Unit 3B: Examining Health Trends and Issues from All Sides
- Unit 3C: Influencing Current Trends and Issues
- Unit 3D: Pulling it All Together: Assignment 3
- Unit 4 Engaging with Local Trends and Issues
- Unit 4A: Health Care Trends and Issues Where You Are
- Unit 4B: Becoming a Small “a” Advocate in Your Sphere of Influence
- Unit 4C: Connecting Advocacy to Your Nursing Practice
- Unit 4D: Pulling it All Together: Assignment 4
This is an asynchronous course that is completed in 16 weeks. The course units are organized in sections to support you in completing the required assignments, which provide evidence of you having met the course learning outcome requirements.
Evaluation
To receive credit for NURS 438, students must complete and submit all of the required assignments and achieve an overall composite grade of C (64 percent). All papers submitted must follow the guidelines of the current APA Publication Manual.
The assignments and weighting of the composite grade is as follows:
| Activity | Weight |
| Assignment 1: Trends and issues position paper | 25% |
| Assignment 2: Evaluating literacy | 25% |
| Assignment 3: Letter of influence | 25% |
| Assignment 4: Becoming an advocate | 25% |
| Total | 100% |
To learn more about assignments and examinations, please refer to Athabasca University’s online Calendar.
Materials
AU Course Materials will email you the course textbook in PDF format.
The textbook for this course is How to Nurse: Relational Inquiry in Action, which will help guide you through the course.
Each study guide unit includes readings, videos, and other resources. Clicking on the link of the resource will allow you to access it directly via the Athabasca University online library or the Internet. Each unit has a reference list that contains all required and supplemental resources.
Other Materials
All other course materials can be found online.