Creating future nursing
The Nursing Course of Kochi Medical School, Kochi University was initially organized as a nursing course at the Medical School of National Kochi Medical University in 1998. With the integration of the 2 universities in 2004, this course has continued for 22 years at Kochi University, which became the first national university providing a midwifery education program, when it was launched in the Master’s Course of Nursing Science at the Graduate School in 2011 to nurture midwives with advanced competencies needed by communities.
With the promotion of the Vision for Community-based Medical Care and Community-based Integrated Care System, the focus of medical services is being shifted from “hospital treatment” to “community life”. The pandemic of COVID-19 is also leading to a new lifestyle.
Nursing seeks to maintain people’s dignity, and fulfill their desire to be healthy and happy in any situation.
The aim of this course is “to cultivate students’ sensibilities backed by rich humanity and high ethical standards, and nurture professionals who understand nursing from global perspectives, help people lead a healthy life, and have sufficient creativity to contribute to the development of nursing science”.
As a characteristic of this course, various systematized liberal arts subjects and curricula are included to create an individual personality as a foundation required for the learning of nursing science, and understanding of humans and surrounding environments from a broad perspective. In specialized subjects, the teaching of cutting-edge medical care by medical doctors from the perspective of human biology enables students to acquire a wide range of highly specialized knowledge, and provide nursing combined with evidence-based, safe, and reliable medicine in the future. Clinical training is mainly provided at the university hospital. A guaranteed training site and guidance through collaboration between faculty members and clinical staff help students address complicated health problems, which will increase their levels of satisfaction and motivation to learn, and consequently deepen their learning of clinical practice. In addition, external facilities located over a wide area are also available for clinical training in this course. The accumulation of clinical training experiences in diverse places from facilities in semi-mountainous areas to patients’ homes is useful for students to provide community-based integrated care in the future.
In 1981, Kochi Medical School Hospital adopted information technology for the first time in Japan, which was also a pioneering attempt in the world. Under such circumstances, information and communication technology was also adopted early for nursing education and the training of nurses in remote medicine and information-oriented society. Through effective educational approaches that promote students’ autonomous learning, it aims to nurture their basic competencies, such as communication, interprofessional collaboration, and problem-solving skills, and develop human resources with innovativeness to flexibly manage social changes and a willingness to continue to study throughout their lives.
The Nursing Course of Kochi Medical School warmly welcomes all those who like to communicate with others, and have an interest in nursing.