Radford University SON graduates BSNs , DNPs, and RN to BSN students. We also include many MSNs among our graduates. Our graduates are doing great things all over the world but particularly in southwest Virginia.
The mission of the Radford University School of Nursing is to educate professional nurses to meet the changing health care needs of the region, state, nation, and world. Educational experiences are designed to prepare students to provide culturally sensitive nursing care to clients' diversity. Students are responsible and accountable for professional nursing practice in keeping with the American Nurses' Association Standards of Nursing Practice.
The teaching and learning process involves a mutual partnership between students and faculty to develop a knowledge base in the liberal arts, sciences, and the discipline of nursing. This partnership exists to promote critical thinking, ethical decision making and lifelong learning. Theory and skills learned in the classroom setting are applied through a variety of learning experiences. Faculty models the professional nursing role through teaching, scholarship, community service, and practice. Students are expected to develop a professional identity and professional values.
The curriculum is based on the faculty's beliefs regarding nursing's four metaparadigm concepts (client, environment, health, and nursing). The client is viewed as a holistic entity: a dynamic, interacting, irreducible whole. Clients can be individuals across the lifespan, families, aggregates, communities and populations. Clients are diverse in such variables as age, gender, sexual orientation, culture, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, lifestyle, values, and functional ability. There is constant interaction between the client and environment. Environment refers to all internal and external conditions, circumstances, and influences--including professional nursing--that interact and affect the client's holistic health. As part of the client's environment, the professional nurse assists with the client's safety and holistic health. Holistic health, a state of wholeness and a process of becoming increasingly integrated, is associated with evolving awareness of self and enhanced quality of life. The nurse and client form a partnership, and both are informed and flexible in negotiations to promote the client's holistic health.
Nursing is both an art and a science. Caring is the essence of professional nursing. The nursing process is utilized to provide evidence based nursing care across the lifespan. Professional nursing involves interdisciplinary collaboration and forming partnerships with clients to facilitate growth and life processes through effective communication and therapeutic nursing interventions. Community based nursing practice provides for continuity of care and focuses on delivering the levels of care needed by the client. To reach their goal, professional nurses assume multiple roles, including clinician, educator, collaborator, advocate, information manager, consumer of research, manager, and leader. Professional nurses must possess the necessary knowledge and skills in health care and information technologies to carry out these roles. Professional nurses influence legislation and policy to advance health care and nursing on a regional, state, national, and global level.
