Conference Proceedings - School of Nursing & Midwifery - Trinity ...

School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin: 8 th Annual Interdisciplinary Research Conference
Transforming Healthcare Through Research, Education & Technology: 7 th – 9 th November 2007
Conference Proceedings
The only negative feedback on meeting the needs of all concerned,
indicated a feeling that “All the needs of Mäori will never be met”
(Participant 9: 63). This participant continued by saying that “No. I
am satisfied with the programme, but what I am not satisfied with
the level of expertise and attention to Mäori components in the
programme” (Participant 9: 155-158). One can only hope that this
is the opinion of a single person, as the BN curriculum will be
preparing nurses to be sensitive to the cultural needs of all their
future clients. Lawson (2004:229) stated that “Competent practice
involves doing the correct things, at the proper times, in the right
ways, with the right people, and securing needed results and other
desirable benefits”. This obviously means that the future nurse
must be able to meet all the needs of all clients as identified above
and when the people responsible for the curriculum doubt this
ability, then certain problems might be pre-programmed.
Conclusion
Overall one can say that the stakeholders were very satisfied with
being involved in the process of developing a new curriculum, which
became “their curriculum” as much as it belonged to the
Department of Nursing and Health Studies.
The study underpinning this paper proved beyond any doubt, that
collaboration between the Stakeholders and the Nursing
Department lead to a higher level of acceptance on the part of the
service providers pertaining to the students and their learning
needs, but it also enables the Department to educate the students
in such a way, that the needs of both students and service providers
are being met.
Even though collaboration has been positively presented, one ought
to warn against an overemphasis on the benefits: “. . . collaboration
is not a panacea, nor is it a “cover all”, umbrella concept for every
conceivable form of collaborative action. It follows that, as
researchers, evaluators, policy makers, trainers, and practitioners
adopt or promote a more coherent, theoretically sound, research
supported and pragmatic conception of collaboration, participating
stakeholders and their diverse constituencies will be able to obtain
one or more of its multiple benefits” (Lawson, 2004: 235).
This example of collaboration has evoked very positive responses
from the stakeholders and the lecturing staff involved in teaching
the programme. It can only be recommended, that other
Departments also use a collaborative process when developing new
curricula, but more important, to evaluate the results of the process
afterwards. The benefits of true collaboration can thus be
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