Integrating preparation for care trajectory management into nurse education: Competencies and pedagogical strategies.

Nurses make an important contribution to the organisation and coordination of patient care but receive little formal educational preparation for this work. This paper builds on Allen's care trajectory management framework to specify evidence-based and theoretically informed competencies for this component of the nursing role and proposes how these might be incorporated into nursing curricula. This is necessary so that at the point of registration nurses have the expertise to realise their potential as both providers and organisers of patient care and are better able to articulate and develop this aspect of nursing practice.