Continuous curriculum review in a bachelor of nursing program: preventing curriculum drift and improving quality.

Higher education institutions have rigorous internal accreditation processes for new courses and typically require thorough course reviews every 5 years. Courses such as nursing must also be accredited by professional registration boards. However, in the years between initial accreditation and formal reaccreditation cycles, the risk of a widening gap between the accredited curriculum and the taught curriculum is real when there is no process to monitor the changes that individual unit assessors make to their subjects as they teach them. This curriculum drift may interfere with the intended development of graduate attributes and the taxonomic structure of assessment tasks across the course. This article describes the implementation of a formative continuous curriculum review process that prevents curriculum drift and enhances the quality of a bachelor of nursing curriculum. Copyright 2010, SLACK Incorporated.