A familiarity with diverse environments' organizational structures, legal, ethical, and economic parameters, as well as diverse client groups, will enable the 21st century nurse to function in diverse settings. To prepare students for the 21st century, students interact with a variety of clients across a diversity of community settings, focusing on primary health care from the first semester of the program. The faculty view the client as encompassing an individual, family, aggregate, or population. In the broadest sense, the client is the recipient of nursing care, whether as an individual, family, group, aggregate, or population. The client is comprised of physiological, psychological, developmental, sociocultural, and spiritual variables which are fluid and constantly interacting with the changing environment.
Clients use adaptive processes to attain or maintain health.
Professional nurses interact with many clients simultaneously from diverse cultural backgrounds and across a variety of environments. As students move through the curriculum, the focus is expanded to include responsibility for more complex clients including families and aggregates experiencing health care alterations. The faculty believe that health is an adaptive state of optimal physiological, psychological, sociocultural, developmental, and spiritual client functioning. Nurses assist individuals, families, aggregates, and populations to identify and implement health promoting strategies. The faculty believe that the rights of access to health care, autonomy in decision-making related to health, and death with dignity belong to all human beings.