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Excerpt
The educational goal of the experience was for students to apply the principles of a change theory, The Seven Steps to Planned Change: An Electric Approach,1 to a change project. The graph from the class text shows how Sullivan and Decker relate their theory to the nursing process (Fig. 1).
Each student was asked to include the following specific components in the paper:
The findings were exciting. Seven change projects were immediately implemented in the agencies, and three were to be implemented in the subsequent 6 months (Fig. 2). Even where change projects were not actually implemented, patient teaching was nonetheless effected; students were empowered and grew professionally; health agency staff awareness of current research increased, and health agency staff were provided with inservice programs. Some examples of students' reflections of their experience that will impact their future practice include the following:
We now know how to go about making a change within an agency;
We learned how to deal with conflict;
I realize that wherever I practice nursing, change cannot take place without the involvement of the power bases; and
This project helped me realize how useful change can be, but how difficult it can be to bring about change
Preparing student nurses for their professional roles as change agents is satisfying and challenging. Although this experience appears to be a valuable one to assist professional students in their future practice as a registered graduate professional nurse in a community health care agency, the next phase of this project is to survey graduates and their employers to measure outcomes of this project in the practice arena.
