I have a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism degree, then decided later in life to go back to school to become a Registered Nurse. I took all of my pre-reqs and completed an 18-month Associate of Science in Nursing program at Harcum College, finished with a 3.3 GPA, and passed my NCLEX-RN with 75 questions on my first try.
I was fortunate enough to be working as a Patient Care Associate (PCA) at a magnet hospital and I was able to get a position as an RN immediately. Since I have started working though, the hospital has been breathing down my neck about when I will be going back to school to get my BSN. I was even told in my interview that I was "lucky" because I was the "only nurse who was being interviewed who did not have a bachelor's degree." This was very offensive to me, and I quickly reminded her that I DO have a bachelor's degree, and that it should count for something. Either way, I got the job and it all worked out.
Now that I am actively seeking a program to go back to school for my BSN, I often find that I will need to go back to school for ANOTHER two years (at least!). I feel that, since I have a bachelor's degree and also have an associate's degree, the pressure to obtain a BSN is kind of silly. Some schools even require that I complete MORE pre-reqs before I am even eligible to apply to their program.
I also wish there were more programs for RNs with bachelor's in another field who would like to bridge into an MSN program. I have found a few programs like this at Thomas Jefferson University (which recently closed this program), and Marquette University (in Wisconsin, and I live in NJ!). I also run into issues with the fact that I do not do well in online classes, and would prefer to remain in the classroom setting.
Is anyone else encountering issues like this? I truly believe that a bachelor's in another field, if juxtaposed with an associate's in nursing and a valid nursing license, should qualify for magnet hospitals.
Any thoughts, feedback, or advice would be greatly appreciated!
Krista
**I placed this topic in the "healthcare politics" section because I really do believe that that's exactly what this is... POLITICS. It doesn't matter that I am a hard worker or that I am an exceptional nurse, all that matters to the "magnet hospitals" is that I have my BSN. I just don't think it's fair.
Just because some studies that favored BSN claim superior outcomes doesn't make it so. There would need to be many different studies proving this over and over again because a couple studies could be an anomaly or fluke. I also am leery of studies done by the ones pushing their products whether BSN or pharmaceuticals! Many truly independent studies would need to be done to prove the point. Look how many times we are told one thing about a med study and later they get completely opposite results in another study. How many times pharmaceutical studies hide the side effects to make money and only acknowledge them after thousands of patients have been harmed and the FDA is getting on their case. I don't believe every study I'm told about!
I don't think there is anything magical about the BSN. Practically speaking a hospital diploma program like the old days would probably have better outcomes than a BSN, but that is a thing of the past. Regardless we all pass the same boards and have the same license and we are pretty much interchangeable. Only difference is now there is a glut of nurses in many places due to the bad economy so employers can be as picky as they want to be!
I think the ihi.org movement of saving one million lives and now five million lives campaign has done more for safety and quality in hospitals than a BSN ever will. Check this site out and you will find many hospitals saw the light and are implementing many of the recommendations such as a rapid response team to prevent a patient from coding in the first place.
You're beating a strawman. Nobody on this side of the debate is arguing that undergraduate degrees generally confer discrete skills and knowledge that can only be obtained via majoring in that particular field of study, and that a bachelor's of science in nursing is somehow the pathetic exception to this rule. Quite the opposite. Undergraduate education is not trade school. You do not need a bachelor's in business to work for a business, or even to be the CEO of one. You do not need a BA in music to be a musician. Newspapers don't hire journalism majors exclusively. You don't have to major in creative writing to be a writer. You don't need a criminal justice major to be a cop. Plenty of genius computer programmers never set foot in a computer science classroom. Mathematics majors often command far greater salaries in finance than finance majors.
Anyone five years into their career in the aforementioned fields would get laughed out of an interview if their major (pardon the pun!) selling point was that their undergraduate major aligned with their current career. Anyone who has worked in a field for more than a couple years knows that, barring the specialized skills and credentials needed to work in that field (clinical nursing skills and passing the NCLEX for nursing), what you specifically majored in as an undergrad means absolutely nothing and has zero predictive power as to your abilities and aptitudes in a particular field.
This is where nursing differs from other fields. The fact that a nursing hiring manager told the OP that she was lucky to be considered because other candidates had undergraduate degrees in nursing, whereas she had merely an undergraduate degree in journalism (and had therefore missed out on what, a semester's worth of nursing theory courses? and had in any likelihood taken the equivalent of those courses directly from the disciplines whose theories nursing education loves to borrow and repackage in watered down form?), is telling. Nursing has an inferiority complex, and tries to compensate by setting up artificial barriers to entry. It's not enough to ace your prerequisites, ace your clinicals, and pass the NCLEX in 75 questions. If you haven't heard the Gospel of Critical Thinking, Research, Cultural Competency, Leadership, and Ethics according to St. BSN, you are less-than. It's an insulting and pathetic attitude, and I don't blame the OP and others in her circumstance for objecting.
NOTE: I emphasize undergraduate over and over because I want to be clear that I completely agree with and understand giving an RN with an MSN weight over an RN with a master's degree in, say, art history. The additional years of study that a master's affords would allow a nurse to conduct the depth of study and research that might actually make a difference in a position relating to health policy, or best nursing practices at a hospital, etc.
Plenty of strawmen to go around here. The original issue (of the thread) wasn't jobs. One can get plenty of nursing jobs (not as many as used to be possible, but, still, plenty) with a BA/BS in something else and an ADN. The original issue was the degree, and why an ADN + other BA/BS isn't considered the same as a BSN.
A growing number of healthcare employers are only hiring those with BSNs. I might be able to work as a musician with my existing credentials, but I would not be able to convince anyone that my musical education plus my nursing credentials equals a degree in music. Ditto for your other examples. It may be possible, even easy, to get a newspaper job without a baccalaureate degree in journalism, but that is a different question than whether or not an ADN in journalism + an unrelated BA/BS is the same as a BA in journalism.
As for your "NOTE:," why? I'm sure there are plenty of RNs out there with Master's degrees in other areas who feel strongly that their basic nursing education and experience plus the research and study that they did in some liberal arts subject for their Master's degree prepares them just as well for graduate level (not advanced clinical practice, obviously, but policy, management, etc.) nursing positions as someone with an MSN. Isn't it rather arbitrary to take the position that the degree doesn't matter at the undergraduate level, but it does at the graduate level?
When I said NCLEX is the same is basically saying the certification is the same to be an RN, only thing different is the type of schooling and length. Again saying that BSN prepared nurses shouldn't feel they are "better" because there are BSN when you took the same certification an ADN did.
1) You are, of course, entitled to your opinion to say it ain't so. However, I didn't say it, the Institute of Medicine says it, backed by very well-constructed studies that show it is true that no matter how you slice it, patient outcomes are better the higher the proportion of BSN RNs are involved in care. The fact that all RNs pass NCLEX is not justification for saying we are all equally competent or that patient outcomes are the same whether we are diploma, ADN, or BSN. They are not. QED.
You don't have to like it, you don't have to believe it, but until you show me large-scale studies that demonstrate your opinion, your uninformed assertion is not credible.
2) Licensure to which one is entitled by passing NCLEX is not certification. All that does is say the licensee has achieved and demonstrated the minimal competence needed to present him/herself as a registered nurse in the state.
Certification in just about any specialty you can name, on the other hand, requires a level of expertise, time in practice (most often at least two full years, and some, more), and, generally, passing a standardized, validated specialty examination based on a well-designed role delineation study.
Sincere question: did those studies control for ADN nurses who also had degrees in other fields?
Aiken LH, Clarke SP, Cheung RB, Sloan DM, and Silber JH. Educational levels of hospital nurses and surgical patient mortality. JAMA 290:12, 1617
Excerpted from Methods:
"Hospital staff nurses were asked to indicate whether their highest credential in nursing was a hospital school diploma, an associate degree, a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, or another degree. The proportion of nurses in each hospital who held each type of credential was computed. Because the educational preparation of the 4.3% of nurses who checked other was unknown, their answers were not included in our hospital – level measures of educational qualifications. It was later verified that this decision did not bias the results. Because there was no evidence that the relative proportions of nurses holding diplomas and associate degrees affected patient outcomes studied, these 2 categories of nurses were collapsed into a single category and the educational composition of the hospital staff was characterized in terms of the percentage of nurses holding bachelor's or master's degrees." (Aiken et al., 2003) (These results have been reproduced since; this is the first such study, 10,184 Pennsylvania nurses. Demographics paralleled those of the Pennsylvania hospital nurses in the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses, and the AHA annual survey)
Surely you aren't suggesting that having a degree in an unrelated field would have made a difference in the level of nursing practice.
Plenty of strawmen to go around here. The original issue (of the thread) wasn't jobs. One can get plenty of nursing jobs (not as many as used to be possible, but, still, plenty) with a BA/BS in something else and an ADN. The original issue was the degree, and why an ADN + other BA/BS isn't considered the same as a BSN.
A growing number of healthcare employers are only hiring those with BSNs. I might be able to work as a musician with my existing credentials, but I would not be able to convince anyone that my musical education plus my nursing credentials equals a degree in music. Ditto for your other examples. It may be possible, even easy, to get a newspaper job without a baccalaureate degree in journalism, but that is a different question than whether or not an ADN in journalism + an unrelated BA/BS is the same as a BA in journalism.
As for your "NOTE:," why? I'm sure there are plenty of RNs out there with Master's degrees in other areas who feel strongly that their basic nursing education and experience plus the research and study that they did in some liberal arts subject for their Master's degree prepares them just as well for graduate level (not advanced clinical practice, obviously, but policy, management, etc.) nursing positions as someone with an MSN. Isn't it rather arbitrary to take the position that the degree doesn't matter at the undergraduate level, but it does at the graduate level?
Ok, I think the problem here is that we're arguing past each other.
It seemed to me that the OP was very much concerned about jobs. The OP wrote: "Since I have started working though, the hospital has been breathing down my neck about when I will be going back to school to get my BSN. I was even told in my interview that I was "lucky" because I was the "only nurse who was being interviewed who did not have a bachelor's degree." This was very offensive to me, and I quickly reminded her that I DO have a bachelor's degree, and that it should count for something."
I understood this to mean that the OP is frustrated because she was almost not hired to a hospital job because she lacks a BSN, and is now in danger of losing her job unless she gets one, even though she has a bachelor's degree in a field that can reasonably be assumed to confer the same advantages (critical thinking, writing skills, interviewing skills, research, etc) that the non-clinical, theory portion of a BSN is meant to provide. And despite the fact that she passed with flying colors the licensing exam that is meant to prove competency for practice. This is the part of her post that I latched on to. Probably because I'm feeling the same sort frustration in the bachelor's-level theory classes of my degree in progress.
Meanwhile it seems that you glossed over this part of her post and latched onto something else entirely: the argument (which I'm not entirely sure she was trying to make) that a BSN is exactly the same as a BA in journalism combined an with ADN. Which, you are 100% correct, it is not! But acknowledging that a BSN and a journalism degree combined with an ADN are not exactly the same does not, I believe, allow us to jump to the conclusion that an employer like the one our OP interviewed with is justified or rational in having a BSN-only hiring policy. Because, and I will argue this until I am blue in the face, the paltry 8 to 10 units (judging by my local state school's BSN program) of theory, research, and policy classes specific to a BSN should not automatically trump the many other factors to take into consideration when hiring a nurse.
But again, yes, I will totally concede that a BSN is not exactly the same as the OP's journalism BA plus ADN. There are differences. Just as, yes, there would be differences in the education of a journalism BA vs an English BA. But not so great that, to use your prior example, a hiring manager for a newspaper wouldn't be a fool for making a blanket policy that completely disregards the one for the other.
As for my note about MSNs being more suited to a management / research / leadership role than an RN with a master's in, say, journalism: no, I don't agree that it's an arbitrary distinction when compared to a BSN. A master's degree is roughly 2 years of focused study in a particular field. Nursing, in this case! Two years of focused study allows for a depth and breadth of investigation into the nuances of healthcare, research, social policy, ethics, etc specific to nursing that the handful of classes provided by a BSN barely touch upon. But, yes, I'll concede that someone with an MA in journalism and an ADN could possibly perform as well or better than an MSN in a position calling for an MSN, but our journalist would have a lot of catching up to do. Orders of magnitude, compared to the ADN/BA journalist who only needs to read the handful of nursing-specific books and articles that their BSN colleagues were assigned during undergrad.
That's ideally speaking, of course. We all know someone who knows someone who got an MSN from an online diploma mill. But that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
Anyone five years into their career in the aforementioned fields would get laughed out of an interview if their major (pardon the pun!) selling point was that theirundergraduate major aligned with their current career. Anyone who has worked in a field for more than a couple years knows that, barring the specialized skills and credentials needed to work in that field (clinical nursing skills and passing the NCLEX for nursing), what you specifically majored in as an undergrad means absolutely nothing and has zero predictive power as to your abilities and aptitudes in a particular field.
I especially appreciate the passion and logic you bring to this discussion. However, there's one very important factor that I haven't seen brought into this iteration.
Universities and colleges have graduated people with degrees in mathematics (and rhetoric, history, literature, physics, and many other fields of study) for hundreds of years in some parts of the world (and even a few in this country) (here's looking at you, Harvard, 1636). While nobody would say that someone with a 50-year-old degree in, say, chemistry would be practicing based on the level of learning available at that time, at least chemistry has had that academic, research-based, peer-reviewed structure de facto or de jure for a very, very long time. Present-day chemistry has a long history of accumulated research and knowledge on which to build. This is one reason why, when a AB (they don't give BAs at Harvard) was a rare and outstanding achievement in 1650 society, it would take you a lot farther than the undergraduate AB in chemistry now. In 1850, an AM was top-notch, because it was so rare. Nowadays, most people who are serious about chemistry eventually end up with doctorates.
In nursing, the largest proportion of our institutional history has not been subject to the same sort of knowledge-sharing, academic research, and peer-review. I know that forty years ago looks like a long damn piece of remote to a lot of the people here, but taking the longer view, forty years is not too much compared to, say, the parvenus of Harvard (compared to Oxford and Edinburgh, and others around the world, going back hundreds of years before that). Forty years ago the proportion of nurses graduating with bachelor's degrees in nursing was around 10%, if memory serves (I was one); the proportion of them at WORK was, obviously, much smaller. Thirty years ago, the proportion of nurses with master's degrees in nursing was around 5% (yup, me too). As an academic, evidence-based profession, we're still beginners compared to most of academia. Personally, I've topped out and won't be doing a doctorate, because in my field, the MN is still comparatively rare and opens a lot of doors for me. In another thirty years, maybe not so much, but I'll be pushing up daisies by then and if anybody remembers me, it'll be my grandchildren.
In nursing we're still at the place where the ABs of the early 19th century were in terms of academic rigor in the overall workforce. This is why the increasing proportion of ADNs is, as time passes, inevitably going to give way to BSNs, as the minimum academic credential. There simply IS more science, more need for a higher level of education in our profession, to meet society's expectation of competence and performance in it. People who study whether this has made a difference has found that yes, it does, pretty much the same as with someone in 1920 with a degree in physiology (a growing field since around 1880s) who went to med school had a leg up on a country doctor with a med school degree from 1885-- beloved, but perhaps could have been better if he had access to more knowledge and tools.
This ongoing thrash about whether a bachelor's in anything else "counts" as evidence of advanced competence in nursing doesn't hold water for historical reasons. Evidence of love of learning, check; overall evidence (here anyway) of better analytics and writing skills than associate degrees, check (and thank you!); personal enrichment that spills over into whatever you do, including nursing, check. Indication of basic intelligence: false equivalence, but not really germane anyway when we're talking about academic standards of acquired learning. But as nursing's academic and scientific basis advances with more reviewable research over the decades, and as society expects more of us (through advanced practice, expectations re legal scrutiny of performance to standards of care), we would be foolish to stay back in the 50s or even the 70s or 80s when bachelor's and master's degrees in our profession were rarer. We have reached the point in our history where an undergraduate degree in our specialty DOES mean something. Time marches on, folks. Ask the chemistry majors.
Anyone five years into their career in the aforementioned fields would get laughed out of an interview if their major (pardon the pun!) selling point was that their undergraduate major aligned with their current career. Anyone who has worked in a field for more than a couple years knows that, barring the specialized skills and credentials needed to work in that field (clinical nursing skills and passing the NCLEX for nursing), what you specifically majored in as an undergrad means absolutely nothing and has zero predictive power as to your abilities and aptitudes in a particular field.
Although I disagree with your final conclusion for reasons to follow, I especially appreciate the passion and logic you bring to this discussion. However, there's one very important factor that I haven't seen brought into this iteration.
Universities and colleges have graduated people with degrees in mathematics (and rhetoric, history, literature, physics, and many other fields of study) for hundreds of years in some parts of the world (and even a few in this country) (here's looking at you, Harvard, 1636). While nobody would say that someone with a 50-year-old degree in, say, chemistry would be practicing based on the level of learning available at that time, at least chemistry has had that academic, research-based, peer-reviewed structure de facto or de jure for a very, very long time. Present-day chemistry has a long history of accumulated research and knowledge on which to build. This is one reason why, when a AB (they don't give BAs at Harvard) was a rare and outstanding achievement in 1650 society, it would take you a lot farther than the undergraduate AB in chemistry now. In 1850, an AM was top-notch, because it was so rare. Nowadays, most people who are serious about chemistry eventually end up with doctorates.
In nursing, the largest proportion of our institutional history has not been subject to the same sort of knowledge-sharing, academic research, and peer-review. I know that forty years ago looks like a long damn piece of remote to a lot of the people here, but taking the longer view, forty years is not too much compared to, say, the parvenus of Harvard (compared to Oxford and Edinburgh, and others around the world, going back hundreds of years before that). Forty years ago the proportion of nurses graduating with bachelor's degrees in nursing was around 10%, if memory serves (I was one); the proportion of them at WORK was, obviously, much smaller. Thirty years ago, the proportion of nurses with master's degrees in nursing was around 5% (yup, me too). As an academic, evidence-based profession, we're still beginners compared to most of academia. Personally, I've topped out and won't be doing a doctorate, because in my field, the MN is still comparatively rare and opens a lot of doors for me. In another thirty years, maybe not so much, but I'll be pushing up daisies by then and if anybody remembers me, it'll be my grandchildren.
In nursing we went for centuries, many centuries, as a craft, learned in an apprentice-like system. Herbalists learnd from other herbalists, midwives from midwives, general caregivers from other general caregivers. Remember, any kind of formal education in nursing is only about 100 years old in this country (and licensure only about 70 years). We're still at the place where the ABs of the early 19th century were in terms of academic rigor in the overall workforce. This is why the increasing proportion of ADNs is, as time passes, inevitably going to give way to BSNs, as the minimum academic credential. There simply IS more science, more need for a higher level of education in our profession, to meet society's expectation of competence and performance in it. People who study whether this has made a difference has found that yes, it does, pretty much the same as with someone in 1920 with a degree in physiology (a growing field since around 1880s) who went to med school had a leg up on a country doctor with a med school degree from 1885-- beloved, enriched in his craft by experience and aptitude, but perhaps could have been better if he had access to more knowledge and tools.
This ongoing thrash about whether a bachelor's in anything else "counts" as evidence of advanced competence in nursing doesn't hold water for historical reasons. Evidence of love of learning, check; evidence (here anyway) of better analytics and writing skills, on average, than associate degrees, check (and thank you!); personal enrichment that spills over into whatever you do, including nursing, check. Indication of basic intelligence: false equivalence, but not really germane anyway when we're talking about academic standards of acquired learning. Plenty of really smart people don't go to or graduate from college; a degree is not a proxy for IQ or aptitude. (But they do really help, don't they?)
As nursing's academic and scientific basis advances with more reviewable research over the decades, and as society expects more of us (for example, through advanced practice, expectations re legal scrutiny of performance to standards of care), we would be foolish to stay back in the 50s or even the 70s or 80s when bachelor's and master's degrees in our profession were rarer. We have reached the point in our history where an undergraduate degree in our specialty DOES mean something. Time marches on, folks. Ask the chemistry majors.
I can't PM you since you haven't posted enough yet so I hope that you see this! Drexel University in Philly has a program for those of use who have a non-Nursing BA/BS and want to get a BSN or BSN/MSN. They have online and live classes. Maybe you live in South Jersey and are just a bridge away!
Aiken LH, Clarke SP, Cheung RB, Sloan DM, and Silber JH. Educational levels of hospital nurses and surgical patient mortality. JAMA 290:12, 1617
Excerpted from Methods:
"Hospital staff nurses were asked to indicate whether their highest credential in nursing was a hospital school diploma, an associate degree, a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, or another degree. The proportion of nurses in each hospital who held each type of credential was computed. Because the educational preparation of the 4.3% of nurses who checked other was unknown, their answers were not included in our hospital – level measures of educational qualifications. It was later verified that this decision did not bias the results. Because there was no evidence that the relative proportions of nurses holding diplomas and associate degrees affected patient outcomes studied, these 2 categories of nurses were collapsed into a single category and the educational composition of the hospital staff was characterized in terms of the percentage of nurses holding bachelor's or master's degrees." (Aiken et al., 2003) (These results have been reproduced since; this is the first such study, 10,184 Pennsylvania nurses. Demographics paralleled those of the Pennsylvania hospital nurses in the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses, and the AHA annual survey)
Surely you aren't suggesting that having a degree in an unrelated field would have made a difference in the level of nursing practice.
Thank you for posting that, but I should have been more specific. By asking if the studies controlled for ADNs with prior degrees in other fields, I was wondering if the studies, or subsequent analysis of the studies, took into consideration the possibility that ADNs with prior degrees in other fields (journalism -- why not?) might provide the same (or even better!) outcomes as BSNs. I was wondering if maybe by lumping the relatively small number of ADNs with a prior degree in with the "normal" ADNs, the study was confusing the benefits of a bachelor's degree (ANY bachelor's degree) with the benefits of a BSN specifically.
That is, maybe it turns out that the average nurse with a bachelor's degree (ANY bachelor's degree -- underwater basket-weaving, even) is a bit less likely to kill patients than the average nurse with only an ADN. And furthermore, maybe this difference in patient outcomes has everything to do with the factors and attributes that your average* person with a bachelor's degree is more likely to possess than your average* person with only an associates degree: higher IQ, less likely to suffer from mental illness (depression, PTSD), less likely to be physically disabled, higher socioeconomic background, less likely to have English as a second language, less likely to be a minority and suffer the inherent stress of racial discrimination, more likely to be male and therefore have more time to focus on work rather than split attention between work and family responsibilities, less likely to abuse substances and less likely to relapse after quitting, etc. All factors that would positively influence patient outcomes but would have absolutely nothing to do with having taken a handful of nursing theory and research classes.
So, yes, I am suggesting that having a degree in an unrelated field could very well make a difference in the level of nursing practice.
*please note that I say "average," here. I am NOT arguing that nobody with a bachelors has a low IQ, is hooked on drugs, or in an abusive relationship. Or that everyone without a bachelors is suffering from mental illness, or comes from a broken home, or etc. Please please please don't confuse my pointing out relatively small statistical differences over population groups as being specifically insulting to any actual person.
An ADN with a bachelors in another field is not the same as a BSN, but it's not as different as some are making it out to be. An Associates journalism degree for instance is really a transfer degree with the journalism portion only being one quarter. Basically, it's show that your grades or interest won't plummet once you start taking journalism program classes.
While it's true that ADN curriculum used to differ significantly from BSN curriculum, which might explain why multiple studies that include a large number of ADN nurses who graduated 30 or more years ago showed a resulting difference in patient outcomes, ADN programs have been progressively adopting BSN curriculum for some time now, at least in part in response to these studies.
An ADN is about 2 years of core nursing program, just as a BSN is about 2 years of core nursing program. In my state the only differences typically between that two year program as an ADN and BSN is that the ADN program is about 9-12 quarter credits shy of what a BSN student gets (usually community health, nursing leadership, nutrition, and sometimes a statistics class in the pre-reqs). So while the curriculum are different, they're only about a quarter's worth of difference. So if you've got a previous bachelors then you've got the 2 years of general electives from that plus about 2 years of core program in nursing, which is also what a BSN graduates with with the exception of about a quarters worth of extra classes.
1) You are, of course, entitled to your opinion to say it ain't so. However, I didn't say it, the Institute of Medicine says it, backed by very well-constructed studies that show it is true that no matter how you slice it, patient outcomes are better the higher the proportion of BSN RNs are involved in care. The fact that all RNs pass NCLEX is not justification for saying we are all equally competent or that patient outcomes are the same whether we are diploma, ADN, or BSN. They are not. QED.
You don't have to like it, you don't have to believe it, but until you show me large-scale studies that demonstrate your opinion, your uninformed assertion is not credible.
2) Licensure to which one is entitled by passing NCLEX is not certification. All that does is say the licensee has achieved and demonstrated the minimal competence needed to present him/herself as a registered nurse in the state.
Certification in just about any specialty you can name, on the other hand, requires a level of expertise, time in practice (most often at least two full years, and some, more), and, generally, passing a standardized, validated specialty examination based on a well-designed role delineation study.
Lol. Now you're insulting my intelligence, "my uninformed assertion is not credible". Don't try to flex your brain with me here. All of that "studies and research information" doesn't mean anything, so you can keep it. Thank you. You totally missed the point of what is being said and the point of this whole OP.
brandy1017, ASN, RN
2,910 Posts
Just because some studies that favored BSN claim superior outcomes doesn't make it so. There would need to be many different studies proving this over and over again because a couple studies could be an anomaly or fluke. I also am leery of studies done by the ones pushing their products whether BSN or pharmaceuticals! Many truly independent studies would need to be done to prove the point. Look how many times we are told one thing about a med study and later they get completely opposite results in another study. How many times pharmaceutical studies hide the side effects to make money and only acknowledge them after thousands of patients have been harmed and the FDA is getting on their case. I don't believe every study I'm told about!
I don't think there is anything magical about the BSN. Practically speaking a hospital diploma program like the old days would probably have better outcomes than a BSN, but that is a thing of the past. Regardless we all pass the same boards and have the same license and we are pretty much interchangeable. Only difference is now there is a glut of nurses in many places due to the bad economy so employers can be as picky as they want to be!
I think the ihi.org movement of saving one million lives and now five million lives campaign has done more for safety and quality in hospitals than a BSN ever will. Check this site out and you will find many hospitals saw the light and are implementing many of the recommendations such as a rapid response team to prevent a patient from coding in the first place.