Internationalising nursing education from the ground up: The case of northern Arizona University

Abstract

Globalisation continues to shape and define the human experience and human institutions in multiple ways and on many levels. Higher education has not been immune to this ubiquitous and revolutionary force. This is especially true in the sense that higher education has a responsibility to prepare leaders of government and industry, scholars to advance new knowledge, workers to cater to the needs of our 21st century civilization. The global imperative in nursing, for example, has never been greater than it is today. For one, it requires a commitment to healing, unconstrained by ethnicity, nationality or language, an ethic promulgated most insistently by Florence Nightingale, the patron saint of this profession. Secondly, the increasing incidence of human migration to different parts of the world means that more people are coming into contact with others from different cultural, linguistic and religious backgrounds.