Nursing care of ADN vs BSN

[AKarpi]

Hi everyone! This is my first post and I have question I need help with. I am currently obtaining my BSN, however, have been working as a home care nurse and don't have a lot of experience with the following scenario. Your experiences are greatly appreciated!

Identify a patient care situation in which you describe how nursing care or approaches to decision-making may differ based upon the educational preparation of the nurse (BSN versus a diploma or ADN degree).

Thanks much!

[VANurse2010]

If the BSN was "over education" wouldn't the research show that outcomes were the same regardless of the degree?

Sent from my iPhone.

The research is not as conclusive as you would have us believe.

[TiffyRN, BSN, PhD]

My hope is that someday I can quantify how novice to expert helps with outcomes, and how that correlates to whether that started before during or after obtaining a BSN...If someone can help me run a study like that, that would be a rather interesting study...

There was a pretty cool study published last year about the effect of not only nurse experience but nurse tenure on a particular unit and its quality of care. They used patient length of stay as a proxy for quality of care. The cool thing was that they collected a year's worth of data. The measures were within the same units. So average length of stay was compared on say. . . the 3rd flood orthopedic unit of the VA hospital in XYZ, USA (the data was collected from a great number of VA hospitals).

Though it does look like they collected data on how many BSN nurses there were, the effect of BSN vs. ADN was not measured. They did conclude that without a doubt, more nursing hours per day shortened length of stay. Furthermore, nursing years of experience also reduced patient length of stay. More importantly nursing tenure on the particular unit further reduced length of stay.

It would be interesting to conduct a similar regression including not only nursing tenure but also nursing education.

I liked the way they really controlled the diversity of patients by following the same units for as long as they did.

Bartel,A.P., Beaulieu, N.D., Phibbs, C.S., & Stone, P.W. (2014) Human Capital and Productivity in a Team Environment: Evidence from the Healthcare Sector. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 6(2), 231-259.