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. The professional nurse must be educated in the science of the profession and utilize a broad knowledge base from humanities, and physical and behavioral sciences. The communication skills of nursing include relationship skills, teaching-learning skills, and computer and information technology skills. Professional nursing is practice in collaboration with consumers and members of the health care community and as such involves skill in forming trusting effective relationships in a wide diversity of sociocultural situations.
Nursing optimizes the value of health care through emphasis on health promotion and education.
Nurses empower clients to make behavior changes by assisting them to improve their knowledge, skills, motivation, and resources. Nurses must be able to access and use the expanding set of technological tools to gain and exchange information and integrate this technology into their clinical practice. The clinical practice skills of nursing are oriented around a process for critical thinking and decision making with the goal of optimizing the client's health. Nursing involves the development of clinical practice skills as well as self-mastery of critical thinking and decision making skills. Management skills are essential for professional nurses to best meet the needs of clients and address health care delivery problems in the 21st century.