New Trends in Nursing Informatics Education Case Study

With the advent of gradually moving nursing education into universities in Germany, the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück was among the first to offer academic programs in Nursing since the early 1980s. In the wake of these developments, nursing researchers at the Osnabrück founded the German Network of Quality Developments in Nursing (in German DNQP), which fosters and supports the development of scientifically based nursing guidelines. Since their foundation in 2002, a multitude of expert standards were published and promoted. Osnabrück was the first German university to appoint a full professor in health informatics to teach nursing informatics. Likewise, it was the first university to establish a research group in 1997 that has integrated nursing informatics into its spectrum of research topics since its foundation.

Today, the nursing study programs at the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück embrace two part-time bachelor programs; one in nursing science, the other in Nursing Management, and a full-time bachelor program in clinical nursing, designed as a dual study in cooperation with hospitals. This set of bachelor programs is supplemented by an inter-professional masters program for healthcare professionals. There are a total of 455 students in these nursing programs, who primarily come from Germany, but among them, there are also students from Austria and Switzerland. All programs embrace a mandatory course in nursing informatics. Due to the regular re-accreditation of these programs, all curricula, including the one for nursing informatics, had to be updated. Furthermore, there was a request from the faculty to synchronize the nursing informatics curricula across all nursing programs.

This case study focuses on the re-evaluation and revision of informatics curriculum within the nursing program at the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück.