[Penguin67]

My nursing program voted to combine the women's health and pediatric courses. I am involved in planning the new course with both faculty, and we have hit a wall as to how to proceed with lectures. As we are a very diverse group, the following ways for lectures were discussed at our last planning meeting:

1. Start with antepartum and proceed topic-wise through labor-delivery and then hit pediatrics, for a "logical progression" approach.

2. We have 4 hour lecture time slots. Do 2 hours of peds and then 2 hours of women's health (or vice versa). This will enable students to ahve lecture content during clinicals, and not have to wait like they would in approach #1.

3. Truly combine the lecture topics to include commen themes for both specialties. EX: assessment would include assessment of the newborn, postpartum, laboring client and child. A faculty member from both specialties would be in the classroom for all lectures.

My question is: If your program also has a combined peds/women's course, what is your lecture approach? Would you be willing to share a course calendar and/or syllabus? If so, let me know and I'll private mail on this forum my e-mail address.

We are so divided on this issue that I wanted to look around and see what other schools are doing. If you ahve any comments, please post! I am very interested in hearing from others who have been down this road.

Thanks so much!

[hikernurse]

I hope you don't mind if a non-educator answers. We had a similar setup and we would alternate weeks. 4 hours of OB one week and 4 hours of Peds the next. We all thought it was a nutty way to do it, but it actually worked out well.

There was plenty of time to do the reading and tests were in the week classes were not held. The OB and Peds classes were taught separately with not a lot of overlap. We had separate teachers for each class and that gave the teachers every other week (sort of ) off, too.

[Penguin67]

Thanks so much for your response! I posted here so that I could her from non-educators, who were students at one time, to get your feedback. It will be helpful and I'll probably take a copy of your post to our next planning meeting.

Many thanks again!