Page 25 - Nursing Education in Malaysia

3/ tHE status of NursiNg iN Malaysia

Clinical performance can be assessed through continuous assessment methods.
Students are assessed in clinical performance including daily habits/behaviours in a complex
practice environment. This encompasses a number of patients/clients in the wards or
homes, management of patients during emergency, relationships with colleagues, patients
and families. Skills assessed include management, communication, team capabilities,
leadership, efficiency and effectiveness as seen from nursing care outcomes.

No matter how and when assessment is carried out, it must be clinical-based: to be
authentic, the students must have direct access to a regular clinical setting where continued
learning can occur. Assessment in both clinical competence and clinical performance
require that students and teachers are in constant contact with each other and with patients
and their families. This would mean that to achieve validity as well as to ensure reliability
in the assessment methods, a college or university must be attached to or an affiliate of a
specialist hospital (250 beds and above as specified by Higher Education Department).
Failure to achieve this, authenticity of clinical assessment can be questioned.

Teacher qualification
Preparation of teachers must be consistent with the curriculum content and approach.
MQA advocates the use of content experts for each course/subject or content area. In
other words, there must be content experts in the medical sciences (anatomy, physiology,
biochemistry, microbiology, pharmacology, nutrition, medicine, surgery, orthopedics
etc); nursing sciences (medical-surgical, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, mental
health, community health, critical care, oncology, gerontology, etc); humanities and social
sciences (communication, sociology, psychology, management, IT, etc); scientific/research
methodology, nursing process, etc); and so on. Authenticity of the programme depends on
the availability of these experts.

It is saying in short that while teaching process is indispensable, the effective process
must not be without indepth knowledge of the content. Medical lecturers survive without
the structured teaching process because they have excellent in depth knowledge of the
subject.

Nursing needs to review its priorities. The current situations where new graduates
of the bachelor of nursing programme are directly employed as teachers; where matrons
and sisters from service organizations occupy such positions as deans, deputy deans and
lecturers; where nurse teachers are allowed to teach medical sciences and social sciences,
research and statistics without the expertise of the subject content, etc – are no longer
acceptable.

To teach in a diploma programme, the nurse teacher needs a clinical degree (a Bachelor
of Nursing) and a probable specialized area of nursing. Teaching skills qualification must
be obtained outside of this degree. Similarly, to teach in a degree programe, the lecturer
must have at least a masters degree in the clinical area of the course to be taught. It simply

1