RATIONALE FOR A MATHEMATICS AND HEALTHCARE NUMERACY BENCHMARK FOR NURSING

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There is an international consensus that nurses need to be skilled in mathematics and healthcare numeracy to provide safe nursing care.

However, there is a lack of consensus on the specific mathematics and healthcare numeracy needed. This has led to an idiosyncratic and relativistic approach to mathematics and numeracy testing in nurse education.’

Healthcare numeracy is culture-specific, deeply embedded and often hidden in the nucleus of professional nursing practice. It is so deeply embedded in the culture of nursing that we call the process of revealing it, ‘decoding the DNA of healthcare numeracy.’

DECODING THE DNA OF HEALTHCARE NUMERACY WHITE PAPER

In this white paper we introduce a 30+ year programme of international translational research that reconfigures the healthcare numeracy paradigm applied to nursing to solve this problem. We present exemplar mathematics and healthcare numeracy competence requirements for nursing practice and regulation. We lay out nursing students’ developmental journey as they move from layperson to qualified professional, and the combined emic, inductive and etic methodology and translational research process we used to:

  1. Identify, transcribe, externalise and make visible the core mathematics and healthcare numeracy underpinning nursing practice;
  2. Develop and classify an individual and combinatory mathematics and healthcare numeracy taxonomy applied to nursing; and
  3. Translate prototype taxonomic blueprints into a constructivist-based authentic virtual-to-situated clinical practice environment transition model. This is designed to support the in-context learning, integration, assessment, transfer and application of competence in mathematics and healthcare numeracy.
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Our translational research process has informed the development of safeHANDS - the Healthcare Authentic Numeracy Development Suite.

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