About this Issue: September/October 2018
To address population health, nurses need an understanding of culture, health promotion, acute and chronic disease management, care coordination, patient and family engagement, and interprofessional collaboration, among other areas. Preparing nurses with population health competencies starts at the prelicensure level with restructured curricula and innovative teaching strategies including clinical experiences. Articles in this issue describe simulation-based learning activities (developed through an academic-practice partnership) to develop students' population health competencies across the curriculum; the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) online nursing curriculum and how you can integrate it in your program; hotspotting: a service learning opportunity where interprofessional teams of students work together to address patients' social determinants of health through home visits; peer training using cognitive rehearsal to promote a culture of safety: and frameworks for QSEN competency integration. Many programs use end-of-program predictive testing to identify students at risk of NCLEX-RN failure. For some students, though, this comes too late. In an important study reported in this issue, researchers examined the relationships between 9 content area assessments and an end-of-program assessment and found that scores on the medical surgical nursing and care of children assessments were predictive of end-of-program test scores. With this knowledge, faculty can provide remediation at the first sign of lagging performance. This article is OPEN, so you can download it and share it freely with others. There are other interesting articles in this issue, eg, on cybercivility, preparing introverts to be nursing leaders, and examining your school's readiness for simulation using the SCORS instrument. Once again, this issue is packed with new ideas for you in your role as a nurse educator.
Marilyn H. Oermann, Editor-in-Chief
