Nursing - Associate Degree

The Associate Degree in Nursing program provides a personalized, quality education designed to prepare you to practice as a registered nurse. The curriculum combines liberal arts and professional nursing courses to help you develop critical thinking and decision-making skills that are essential in today’s healthcare environment.

The curriculum is designed to prepare you to:

• Employ practices to ensure the safety of patients and improve outcomes of care.
• Advocate for patients, recognizing the patient or designee as the source of control and full partner in compassionate, coordinated care.
• Collaborate effectively within nursing and inter-professional teams to achieve safe, quality patient care across a variety of healthcare settings.
• Use nursing judgment based on best current evidence to provide safe care for patients and families across the lifespan.
• Apply principles of quality improvement to monitor outcomes of care and minimize risk of harm to patients and providers.
• Use information and technology to communicate, document care, minimize error, and support decision making.
• Demonstrate professionalism in the implementation of the role of the registered nurse.

Through D&E’s partnership with Vandalia Health Davis Medical Center and a network of clinical facilities across the region, you’ll gain hands-on experience in acute care, long-term care, mental health, maternal-newborn, and community settings starting in your first semester.