ADN Prepared Nurses Vs. BSN Prepared Nurses
Darcie Byrd RN
Grand Canyon University
My first day of my first class in nursing school my instructor began his lecture by telling his students that a career in nursing is a career in lifelong learning. Throughout the course he encouraged us all to continue our education beyond the ADN program. He was open and blunt in his opinions about the need for higher degree prepared nurses.
Along with many other students I rolled my eyes and decided the difference between and ADN and a BSN degree was not great enough to push me beyond my associate degree in nursing. I thought, a nurse is a nurse, and experience ...view middle of the document...
This allowed men and women to attend school who otherwise would not have been able to for various personal reasons. It also allowed for new nurses to enter the workforce sooner to alleviate some of the bourdon on nurses at that time. The growth in popularity and lower cost of the ADN programs led to hospitals closing their diploma programs. These nurses were trained in the technical skill of nursing and prepared to the NCLEX licensure test.
Many hospitals are beginning to require nurses to have at least a bachelor’s degree in nursing prior to being hired. This comes in response to multiple studies that show hospitals that employ larger percentages of baccalaureate prepared nurses have a lower rate of patient deaths and failure to rescue as mentioned by Luckowski. “A research study by Aiken and colleagues identified a clear link between higher levels of nursing education and better patient outcomes.” (Luckowski, 2015). Nurses with higher degrees demonstrate a stronger ability to use critical thinking skills. One definition of critical thinking is: “an investigation whose purpose is to explore a situation, phenomenon, question or problem to arrive at a hypothesis or conclusion about it that integrates all available information and that, therefore, can be convincingly justified.” (Adams, 1999). In a study discussed by Adams, 1999, practicing nurses with BSN and MSN degrees of education scored better in critical thinking skills than ADN prepared nurses with similar amounts of clinical experience.
It is the goal of most hospitals to now employ bachelor’s of science in nursing of higher educated registered nurses. As stated in the article ‘The IOM...
