Nursing Vision, Mission, & Philosophy


To be the leader in advancing the nursing profession through excellence in education that improves health for all.


Grounded in an environment of scholarship, the mission of the WSU Department of Nursing is to educate knowledgeable Caring, Ethical, Creative, and Accountable nurse leaders who provide person- and relationship-centered care for individuals, families, groups, communities and populations in a diverse society. This mission is based on the beliefs that:

  1. a caring, diverse, and respectful community provides the best environment for students to learn how to care for themselves and others;
  2. optimal learning to care for self and others occurs in a caring, diverse and respectful community;
  3. faculty and students are accountable for maintaining and modeling professional standards of moral, ethical, and legal conduct;
  4. recognizing and valuing human diversity is essential to person- and relationship- centered care;
  5. individuals have different ways of knowing and learning about the world;
  6. creativity and innovation contribute to continuous quality improvement and sustainability;
  7. an enriched learning environment is the responsibility of faculty, staff, and students;
  8. effective nurse leaders engage in continuous professional development and lifelong learning;


The undergraduate and graduate curricula are based on a shared philosophy that views the professional nurse as an individual with a minimum of a baccalaureate degree in nursing who may also possess a master’s degree or a doctorate.

The philosophy of the Department of Nursing states that the professional nurse provides care that is:

  1. Person-Centered. Person-centered care is an approach in which individuals are viewed as whole persons. It involves advocacy, empowerment, and respecting the person’s autonomy, voice, self-determination, and participation in decision-making. Persons are defined as the participants in nursing care or services. They may be individuals, families, groups, communities, aggregates, organizations, systems, and populations. Persons may seek or receive nursing interventions related to health promotion, health maintenance, disease prevention, illness management, and end-of-life care. Depending on the context or setting, persons may be referred to as patients, clients, residents, consumers, customers and/or organizations of nursing care or services.
  2. Relationship-Centered. Relationship-centered care values and attends to the relationships that form the context of compassionate care, including those among and between:
    1. practitioners and recipients of care
    2. individuals as they care for themselves and others
    3. practitioners and communities in which they practice
    4. healthcare practitioners across various professions
    5. administrators and managers as they set the environment and resources for care
  3. Evidence-Based. Evidence includes research findings and their interpretation, practitioner and consumer expertise and preferences. The nurse draws upon these types of evidence to inform critical thinking and decision-making.
  4. Respectful. Respectful care is based upon mutual relationships that embrace diversity, and promote dignity and choice. Diversity includes the range of human variation that professional nurses encounter. Age, race, gender, disability, ethnicity, nationality, religious and spiritual beliefs, sexual orientation, political beliefs, economic status, native language, and geographical background are included.


The professional nurse achieves the following educational outcomes in relation to seven key characteristics:

  1. Critical Thinker: Integrates questioning, analysis, synthesis, interpretation, inference, inductive and deductive reasoning, intuition, application and creativity to aid in clinical reasoning and to make appropriate clinical judgments.
  2. Culturally Sensitive Practitioner: Demonstrates knowledge, understanding, and skill in providing culturally sensitive care to diverse individuals, families, and populations.
  3. Effective Communicator: Demonstrates effective professional communication with persons, members of their support system, and interdisciplinary team members to build relationships that promote person- and relationship-centered care and improve outcomes.
  4. Excellent Provider of Care: Provides safe, compassionate, person-centered, relationship-centered, evidenced-based, and respectful care to individuals, families, and populations across the lifespan and continuum of care.
  5. Ethical Decision Maker: Demonstrates moral, ethical and legal conduct in practice.    
  6. Facilitator of Learning: Implements teaching and learning strategies to ensure the development of attitudes, knowledge and skills to maximize health outcomes. Promotes lifelong learning for self and others.
  7. Organizational and Systems Leader: Applies leadership skills to manage environmental and system resources, within and across health care systems, to provide evidence-based nursing care that contributes to safe, high quality, patient outcomes and improvements in healthcare delivery.