Mission and Philosphy

Mission

The Felician University School of Nursing and Health Sciences, within the framework of Catholic tradition and commitments to Franciscan values, strives to educate innovative health care practitioners, leaders, and scholars dedicated to promoting access to safe, evidence-based, high-quality, equitable, and inclusive health care for diverse populations. Graduates of the Felician School of Nursing and Health Sciences are prepared to advance health and practice as integral inter-professional team members to meet the challenges of the 21st century in an evolving global and technologically advanced health care environment.

Philosophy
  • Human Persons are unique and sacred beings, who are endowed with the capacity of making decisions and choices which affect their lives and the lives of others; that they have a diverse potential for self-care and continually strive to identify and meet their own needs; and, that with all of society, the have a right to health care.
  • Health, which is a matter of personal perception, may differ from person to person, and be achieved in the presence of illness and disability; and that a pattern of Health is one way in which Human Persons reveal their existence and affect their ability to initiate and perform self-care actions to meet universal and developmental needs, and health deviations self-care requisites.
  • Culture, which is both learned and acquired, and has a transgenerational quality is a way of life which emphasizes the holistic, integrated totality of life for persons and motivates their perceptions of health and illness through the influence of values, beliefs, and practices.
  • The Environment is a dynamic energy, external to the person. Human persons and the environment continuously interact, having consequences, which mutually affect the health and well-being of each other.
  • Nursing, as an art and a science with caring and advocacy as its essential components, and as a universal need of all persons, is a collaborative process, which recognizes and respects the diversity of human persons and is involved in health promotion, health maintenance, and the restoration of health for individuals, families, groups, and communities.
Philosophy of Nursing Education

The nursing faculty builds its philosophy of education upon the broad guidelines contained within the University’s and the School’s mission statements. Faculty members believe that nursing education should allow for constant integration of knowledge from the humanities, the natural and social sciences, and nursing. Nursing education is a process of facilitating the development of competencies in nursing practice as well as fostering values of personal and professional integrity, caring, and service to society.

Faculty members believe that the educational process in nursing should recognize prior learning and facilitate program articulation to promote career mobility and professional growth. Recognizing the varying educational and experiential backgrounds of our diverse population of students, faculty members continually seek assessment strategies that assist them in fully understanding student’s learning needs.

Faculty members also recognize the diversity and complexity of students’ life styles and the demands that this imposes on them. Thus, faculty members strive to create an educational environment that is flexible and sensitive to a variety of leaning needs, and which fosters collaboration among faculty and students based on mutual respect and responsibility. Within this climate, faculty members utilize a variety of teaching strategies to help students develop competencies for caring, critical thinking, communication, therapeutic intervention and professional development.