Background: China's population has begun to age rapidly in the past several years and this trend is predicted to continue. In the face of this growing older population, the existing number of aged care personnel, especially medical care professionals, can hardly meet the demand for aged care services.
Aim: To develop geriatric nursing micro-credentials (MCs) for undergraduate nursing students based on standardized training objectives and to specify the learning goals and course modules that correspond to each specific MC.
Design: Modified Delphi study.
Methods: An initial set of geriatric nursing MCs were developed based on the training objectives. Expert group discussion (n=13) reviewed the clarity and intelligibility of the statements' wording and supplemented the framework. A three-round Delphi survey (n=15) was then employed to obtain a consensus on the learning goals and course modules via an online questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data.
Results: The final geriatric nursing MCs consisted of six courses, namely fundamentals of geriatric nursing (8 modules), geriatric sociology (6 modules), geriatric clinical nursing (3 modules), geriatric psychological nursing (8 modules), geriatric rehabilitation nursing (8 modules) and geriatric hospice care (10 modules).
Conclusion: Nursing faculty can use the geriatric nursing MCs developed in this study to train current undergraduate nursing students to become backups for current, fully credentialed geriatric caregivers.
Keywords: Curriculum; Geriatric Nursing; Micro-credentials; Modified Delphi method; Nursing education.
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