The University of Michigan School of Nursing and the Health System partnered to develop an undergraduate clinical education model as part of a larger project to advance clinical education, practice, and scholarship with education serving as the clinical bridge that anchors all three areas. The clinical model includes clusters of clinical units as the clinical home for four years of a student's education, clinical instruction through team mentorship, clinical immersion, special skills preparation, and student portfolio. The model was examined during a one-year pilot with junior students. Stakeholders were largely positive. Findings showed that Clinical Faculty engaged in more role modeling of teaching strategies as Mentors assumed more direct teaching used more clinical reasoning strategies. Students reported increased confidence and competence in clinical care by being integrated into the team and the Mentor's assignment. Two new full time faculty roles in the Health System support education, practice, and research. 1. Introduction Over the past several years, schools of nursing have been called upon to restructure education programs to better prepare graduates for increasingly complex and rapidly changing health care environments [1–3]. According to Benner and associates [2], nursing education programs must be redesigned to prepare nurses for new responsibilities and challenges in these health care environments. To accomplish this, the practice-education gap must be addressed by major shifts in both curricula and teaching methods [2]. The call to revise nursing education programs is paralleled by similar calls from other organizations including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) [4] and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) [5]. The Institute of Medicine’s 2001 report, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century, recommended that leaders in health professions should develop strategies for “restructuring clinical education to be consistent with the principles of the 21st-century health system throughout the continuum of undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education for medical, nursing, and other professional training programs” (Recommendation 12, p. 208). The recent consensus report of the RWJF in collaboration with the IOM, “Initiative on the Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health” [6], emphasizes that nurses should achieve higher levels of education and training through an improved education system that promotes seamless academic progression. Recently, partnerships between schools of nursing and service
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