Taking Education to a New Level

Greetings,

This week I’ve been involved in multiple conversations about some of the challenges that face students in our many healthcare education programs. Kaplan University and the Kaplan Campus programs educate thousands of students in a variety of healthcare disciplines. As Dean of the School of Nursing I work with faculty that teach more than 2600 nursing students. In our Bachelor of Science and Master of Science nursing programs our students are women and men who have already completed a basic level of nursing education and have worked as registered nurses. Many of these students enter our Nursing program having worked for years in hospitals and other healthcare organizations and are now seeking to advance their education so that they can be of greater value in the environments where they work today or will work in  the future.  However, given the current issues with our nation’s healthcare system all of these students are dealing with a greater degree of uncertainty than at any time in recent history. We are not sure of how the current healthcare reform plans that are being considered will be resolved. We do know that the next steps with healthcare will affect everyone in the country, regardless of their state of health. The reality is that we are facing what may also be a tremendous opportunity to create a healthcare system that provides improved levels of access, quality and efficiency.  One of the ways we prepare our students to be successful in working for positive changes in healthcare delivery is to be sure they are aware of the current issues that are priorities for healthcare organizations.  Today the priorities include increasing access to the growing number of uninsured and under-insured, improving quality, reducing costs and working to help shift a greater amount of resources to preventive health care. 

Part of being effective in working in healthcare organizations is being an effective communicator. We emphasize effective communication skills for all of our students. Recently I have been reading “Crucial Confrontations” by Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Kerry Patterson  and Al Switzler (2005). This book is a “how to” on handling some of the most difficult interactions we encounter in working with others. The authors had an earlier book, “Crucial Conversations”, and while this new book is designed to build on the skills presented in the earlier book, it really isn’t necessary to have read the first book to gain valuable insights and very practical aproaches to working through confrontations.  The book outlines how confrontations can occur when people make assumptions without having accurate or complete information.

Another resource for improving interpersonal effectiveness is to use the concepts of emotional intelligence (Boyatzis, R. Goleman, D., & McKee, A., 2002) One of the most interesting studies about the impact of emotional intelligence in organizational effectiveness was conducted at Johnson & Johnson (Brienza, 2001).  One of our key goals is to provide students with education that allows them to excel in their places of employment. It’s critical that students develop communication skills that allow them to handle the difficult situations and be confident and prepared to advocate for the kinds of positive change that will result in better healthcare for everyone.

Boyatzis, R., Goleman, D., & McKee, A. (2002).  Primal leadership: Learning to lead with emotional intelligence. Boston, MA:  Harvard Business School Press.

Brienza, D. & Cavallo, K. (2001). Emotional competence and leadership excellence at Johnson & Johnson: the emotional intelligence and leadership study. From the Consortium on Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at http://www.eiconsortium.org/.

Grenny, J., McMillan, R., Patterson, K. & Switzler, A. (2005) Crucial confrontations. New York, NY. McGraw Hill.