Bachelor of Science in Nursing

The BSN curriculum includes courses in the humanities, social sciences, basic sciences, and nursing science. The clinical component of nursing courses enables students to apply their learning to actual client, family, and community situations that warrant nursing intervention. The curriculum has been carefully designed to equip graduates to begin professional nursing practice with patients of all ages in any health care setting where there is a position for the professional nurse at the start of his or her career. The program also provides an excellent foundation for graduate study in nursing and in other fields. The baccalaureate program (BSN) is available for high school graduates who aspire to a career in nursing (basic students). It is also available to registered nurses (RNs) who are licensed graduates of associate degree or diploma nursing programs seeking to continue their career development and to individuals with college degrees in other fields who wish to attain the bachelor of science in nursing. The basic BSN program can be completed in four years at WVU’s Morgantown campus or at WVU Institute of Technology. Programs at Potomac State College and Glenville State College allow students to complete pre-nursing requirements at those institutions. Major Learning Goals CRITICAL THINKING: Employ scholarly inquiry and evidence-based reasoning and creativity in the process of assessment, interpretation, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and inference as a basis for professional nursing practice. NURSING INTERVENTIONS: Ensure quality care by applying theory, evidence-based clinical judgment and decision-making, and patient care technology in the delivery of safe and skilled nursing therapeutics with individuals, families, communities, and populations across the health-illness continuum. PROFESSIONAL ROLE: Demonstrate knowledge, attitudes, professional values, personal qualities and behaviors consistent with the nursing roles of health care designer and coordinator, organization and system leader, and advocate for consumers and the nursing profession. CARING: Provide empathetic, culturally sensitive, and compassionate care for individuals, families, communities, and populations that uphold moral, legal, and ethical humanistic principles. COMMUNICATION: Integrate therapeutic, interpersonal, intraprofessional, interprofessional and informatics communication processes in professional nursing practice. Career Profile Demand for professional nurses is high and is predicted to increase due to changes in health care, the growing number of older persons and the large number of nurses nearing retirement age. Nursing positions are available in all areas of nursing in every region of the country. The need for nurses is especially acute in intensive care, rehabilitation, geriatrics and long-term care. Employment in home health care continues to grow rapidly. This is in response to the increasing number of older persons with functional disabilities, consumer preference for care in the home and technological advances that make it possible to bring increasingly complex treatment into the home.