Academic staff and students who entered the Master´s Program in April 2017.

The big news confirms the methodical and dedicated work of the group of professionals who are part of the academic body of this postgraduate program. The Master in Nursing with specialization in Care Management is directed by Dr. Edith Rivas who said that “the main goal we reached is that we contributed to the training of academic teams at different Universities in the country.”

On Thursday, January 25 of 2018, the Accreditation Council in the Health area decided unanimously to accredit the Master´s Program in Nursing with specialization in Care Management of the Universidad de La Frontera for seven years, from January 25th of 2018 to January 25th of 2025.

“It is a tremendous satisfaction to have reached this achievement after hard work with a dedicated team and an academic body of high-quality and productivity. These are the fundamental elements that permit us to position ourselves in our country with this accreditation. It is important to emphasize that this Master´s Program made the transition from professional to academic, and the second thing is the accreditation for seven years. I want to thank the whole academic and administrative team and the students for their commitment, since this accreditation demonstrates their quality”, assured Edith Rivas.

For the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Dr. Patricio Valdés, “with this accreditation, we can develop and project the discipline of Nursing over the years, and why not think about a future doctoral program. The work of the academic body of the Master´s Program and the Nursing Department has solidly grown and we are proud of that.”

HISTORY

The Master´s Program started in 2008 with its first version. By now, it already has 75 graduates and the eleventh version starts in April 2018 with 12 selected academic staff members from different academic units in Chile.

“The main goal reached by this Master´s Program is that it contributed to the training of academic teams at different national universities, such as U. Santo Tomás, U. de Los Lagos, U. Austral de Chile, U. Autónoma, U. Mayor and U. de La Frontera. Besides, today we also have students from the Felix Bulnes Hospital in Chillán and Executives of hospitals in Santiago de Chile. They had the possibility to choose other Master´s Programs, but they chose the UFRO. This accreditation permits to obtain more Conicyt (National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research) scholarships, which we already have accessed in previous years”, Rivas added.

CHALLENGES

One of the challenges that are coming up is to emphasize the research lines. “We have to diversify the work groups of other areas, such as social sciences, clinical epidemiology, public health, ethics and others. That is where we have an important demand and we have to apply for more funds. Another challenge is to strengthen our international relations – we have already been working with universities in Columbia and Spain – in order to advance towards specific accreditations between master´s programs, which often is difficult because of the lack of funds, since we are fully self-supported”, Rivas specified.

THESIS

Another milestone of the Master´s Program is the outstanding work in the different theses and the direction the students have taken in their research projects.

“There has been an improvement in the theses contents. In previous years, the theses included a systematic revision with a meta-analysis, which is a more complicated and new design for nurses, with important results that might have impact on public policies. The research which is more common is the experimental and the clinical trial one, but systematic revisions do have more effective results. We can see advances in the publications and we have incipient lines and, since 2018, each student, before taking the final exam, has to present a SciELO, ISI or Scopus publication”, Rivas added.

During the years of work, the Master´s Program created possibilities of extending their skills in the framework of Care Management Workshops and Colloquiums in Research in Nursing. Through these opportunities, the students get access to classes with teachers with an outstanding curriculum in Chile and internationally, and to online conferences thanks to the inversion that has been made in the academic spaces of the Nursing Department.

“We are contributing to the solution of problems based on public policies with theses about gender problematics, intercultural topics, or historical socio anthropological development, but with view on Health Care and that has been a great credit. All of our thesis guiding teachers are part of the cloister, in other words, they are from the highest hierarchy, with Doctor´s Degrees and a productivity within the standards of the National Accreditation Commission (CNA) and Conicyt”, Edith Rivas concluded.