Nursing

The Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) curriculum at St. Mary’s University is based on the core concept of patient-centered care, supported by professionalism, safety, evidence-based practice, teamwork and collaboration, quality improvement, and informatics. These supporting concepts are equally important and interdependent with nurses using clinical reasoning to make clinical judgments when providing patient-centered care.

Caring and compassion are foundational not only for patient-centered care but also for creating the respectful healing environments that are hallmarks of the Nursing Program. Graduates of the St. Mary’s Nursing Program will fully integrate all conceptual components of the framework into their nursing practice.

The curriculum is designed to take students from simple to complex knowledge, skills, and attitudes. There are a total of 123 credit hours to meet the degree requirements. The total credit hours are comprised of the following:

• Courses from the St. Mary’s University core curriculum,
  • CH 1305 Chemistry for Health Professionals (3 credits) meets both St. Mary’s common core natural science requirement and a prerequisite of the nursing curriculum
  • MT 1304 Algebra with Clinical Applications (3 credits)
  • PS 2355 Development (3 credits)
  • PS 3381 Introductory Statistics (3 credits)
• Prerequisite courses for nursing core (8 credits),
  • CH 1305 Chemistry for Health Professionals (credits already counted toward St. Mary’s core curriculum)
  • BL 1411 Anatomy and Physiology I (4 credits)
  • BL 1412 Anatomy and Physiology II (4 credits)
  • BL 2420 Microbiology for Health Professions (4 credits)
• BL 2311 Food and Nutrition (3 credits) and,
• Nursing courses (63 credits).

Starting in second semester of sophomore year, select nursing courses will have both a didactic and skills lab/simulation/clinical components.