Professional Education

The Challenge: Today’s nursing educators are faced with an enormous challenge—to help their nursing students make sense of multiple initiatives they will face in healthcare settings, from improving the overall quality of care, enhancing patient safety, delivering an outstanding experience that is patient-centered, and aligning their behaviors with an organization’s mission and values. The QSEN (Quality and Safety Education for Nurses) competencies were developed to address this challenge of preparing future nurses with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) necessary to continuously improve the quality and safety of the healthcare systems in which they work.

The Simple Solution to Aligning Curricula to QSEN: The StoryCare Learning System is designed to address this crucial educational issue, and is dedicated to bringing educational and personal focus to the “why” in addition to the “how” of treating patients. To accomplish this, StoryCare and its library of story simulations with accompanying instructional materials have been engineered to align with the QSEN core competencies, including Evidence-Based Practice, Patient-Centered Care, Quality Improvement, Safety, Teamwork and Collaboration, and Informatics. Not only does StoryCare help embed the knowledge, skills, and attitudes outlined in the QSEN competencies, it continuously improves the behaviors and standards of those nurses already working in a variety of healthcare environments.

Bringing the Challenges of the Hospital Environment Alive for Learners: StoryCare is much more than just an extensive library of healthcare related stories. The StoryCare Learning System offers nursing educators a wide range of real-world, healthcare simulation strategies for classroom and simulation-based learning. The fundamentals of StoryCare draw on cultural traditions going back thousands of years. From the beginning of human history people have been using storytelling to teach and engage each other with important ideas crucial to survival. Contemporary science has confirmed what ancient people intuitively understood—we are all “wired” for story. In fact, extensive research in the educational field and the social sciences has found that when coupled with reflection, there may be no more powerful “springboard” for learning and changing behavior than storytelling.