Achieving graduate outcomes in undergraduate nursing education: following the Yellow Brick Road

Abstract

Nursing practice is a dynamic and constantly changing field within healthcare, with well-documented challenges to maintaining a suitably skilled workforce to meet the needs of the community it serves. Undergraduate nursing education provides the mandatory minimum requirements for professional registration. Each nursing program has clearly stated graduate attributes, qualities that their graduates will possess on graduation. The aim of this paper is to stimulate discussion about graduate attributes for nurses, a transferrable set of specific attributes that make nursing graduates work ready. This paper focuses on identifying specific attributes, the embedding of those attributes in nursing education, particularly through role modelling, with the aim of producing a future workforce that is knowledgeable, compassionate and confident. The graduate attributes are likened to the qualities sought by the characters in ‘The Wizard of Oz’; brains, heart and courage and the learning process as the ‘Yellow Brick Road’. There is a relative lack of discussion about role modelling by nurse educators for nursing students, a potentially undervalued learning experience that we believe must be brought to the forefront of discussions pertaining to undergraduate nursing education and achieving graduate outcomes.