This approach changes the conventional way of thinking about how quality nursing programs are assessed and changes the levels of requirements to better suit student learning with better access to libraries, counseling and tutoring services, computing equipment, tuition, and financial aid to name a few. But where this Associates Degree approach will benefit the profession most is in the healthcare system where it is needed most. New nurses will be better acclimated to the needs of sophisticated logging processes, medical billing and inventory as well as scheduling and other tasks now all handled via digital processing and computer. A modern day nurses are more technologically sophisticated, the overall patient care process also gets better as more available free time is offered back to the patient directly.

Shorter programs will be a boom with individuals who choose family first and career second. It is far more likely for a mother to choose a two-year program over a four-year program when the children are out of the home. Mothers already have the inherent skill set of motherly instinct and hands on training and only the educational aspects of the nursing profession are needed. This type of short detailed teaching approach would therefore be a very applicable tool for recruiting new nurses of all ages and social backgrounds.

Discuss possible solutions to the problem.

There are many solutions available in the sense of creating an Associates Degree for the RN nursing process. This report analyzes three solutions and of the three will choose one. The first solution...

This solution entails getting the best minds in the profession and starting from scratch.
By doing this, the process may experience all new growing pains but would be very modern at the least. A second approach would be to have two processes, a completely new system that runs in conjunction with the existing educational process. The problem with this solution is that different levels of education may inadvertently be created. In other words, when a standard is changed in one but not the second, two different levels of standardization may occur and thus affect the licensing process.

A third solution, and one we recommend is that the existing process be evaluated utilizing some standardization from the modern business industries of manufacturing. As previously mentioned, the Six Sigma process is an excellent tool for evaluating existing processes and thereby creating alternative solutions from the previous version. In the business world, quality can be defined as the total of features and characteristics of a product or service. With Six Sigma, an organization focuses on continuous improvement of their quality. This would be accomplished in an RN Associates Degree program by understanding various needs of patients, the healthcare and nursing systems as a whole as well as the existing educational and licensing processes. For Six Sigma, a statistical measure of variation is equivalent to 99.9997% defect free. Every process can be characterized by:

Average performance, (X bar) and Inherent variation, (Sigma). Chart generated