NURS 7306: Healing Environments in Complex Adaptive Systems

This course provides students with a systematic analysis of existing conceptual maps descriptive of health care organizations and systems, identifying their characteristics and outcomes as these relate to nursing as a healing ministry. With this backdrop, an in depth exploration of the specific conceptual map of complex adaptive systems (CAS) shapes the course as students investigate the creative and humanizing impact of this mental map. Students explore implications of the map for managing diversity, ensuring interprofessional collaboration, reframing policy and practices, initiating transformational changes, and ensuring desired outcomes. The role of healthcare informatics, social media and rapidly changing technologies will be examined within a CAS framework of meaning, both as challenges and opportunities. This examination, informed by the Catholic intellectual tradition, will focus particularly on challenges and opportunities as they relate to issues of social justice in health care. CAS will be discussed as a mental map to relate to and understand communities, environmental and occupational health, cultural variances and the unique needs of the students’ self-selected populations of interest.