Master’s in Medical-Surgical Nursing - Critical Care

The study program’s generic objectives:

• Promote the development of knowledge in the context of critical care that supports the practice of specialized nursing.
• Provide the development of skills for the provision, management and supervision of advanced nursing care to the sick person in critical condition and to the family during their illness and recovery process.
• Encourage the integration of scientific evidence in the practice of health professionals and in the organization of care for people in critical situations.
• Encourage critical analysis of the ethical, legal, political, social and economic dimensions resulting from the practice.
• Encourage the articulation of theoretical and scientific knowledge in nursing and other disciplines in different contexts of practice.

Intended learning outcomes (knowledge, skills and competences) to be developed by the students:

• Addressing complex issues in a systematic, reflective, creative and innovative way.
• Demonstrate an in-depth level of knowledge in PCC care and critical awareness of current / new problems in the discipline.
• Select relevant information sources for decision making.
• Expose and clearly argue the results of your reasoning.
• Mobilize, rigorously, the data of the investigation reports.
• Caring for the person experiencing complex processes of critical illness and / or organ failure.
• Streamline the response to situations of exception, catastrophe or emergency, from conception to action.
• Maximize intervention in the prevention and control of infection of the person in a critical situation and / or organ failure.
• Manage care, optimizing the response of the nursing team and the articulation in the multiprofessional team
• Develop coherent research projects

Insertion of the study program in the institutional educational offer strategy, in light of the mission of the institution and its educational, scientific and cultural project:
ESEL's mission is to be a center for the creation, development, transmission and diffusion of nursing culture and science, which aims at excellence and innovation. It has as references the flexibility and compatibility between training and degrees within the European space of higher education, the mobility of teachers and students, the employability of degrees to be conferred within the fundamental principles of the Bologna Declaration.
Its educational project includes the provision of training at the level of the 3 study cycles: bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees, as well as the training offer of non-degree courses, nationally and internationally certified p. eg, SBV-DAE certified by INEM and ATCN®, certified by the Society of Trauma Nurses and the American College of Surgeons.
The training at the level of the master's programs allows the three nursing training cycles to be consistently articulated and is anchored in its own teaching staff, qualified with a doctorate and a master's degree in nursing and in other areas of knowledge, specialists in nursing-medical-surgical and others as well as professors with a Specialist Degree (Dec-Law No. 206/2009 of 31 August).
This training practice is supported by embodied research in several projects already completed and in progress. It also emphasizes cultural activity through initiatives such as the launch of books, lectures, the organization of workshops and other events open also to the community.
The technical-scientific evolution of health care, the social pressure towards quality, safety and the importance of customer-centered care, simultaneously with the need to optimize resources, has led to the traditional frontiers of more specialized care being largely outdated. Currently, hospital services absorb a progressively older and sicker population. Hospital care has undergone changes, being mostly aimed at dealing with unstable and highly complex health situations that imply the use of therapeutic devices that require a specialized clinical intervention. The dissemination of spaces where nurses are asked to provide care, along with the expansion of hyper-specialized hospital services, where hard technology prevails (UCIs), challenges the acquisition of increasingly transversal and specialized skills, articulating traditional performance in intra-hospital and extra-hospital context.
The current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, which determined the recruitment of nurses with skills in providing care in ICUs, is a current example of the need to ensure training in this area of intervention.
The 10-year experience in training in this area, in which demand has far exceeded the number of places available, MMSN-PCC has great potential to attract students whose training translates into health gains