Our teams have produced a series of open educational nursing resources freely available online resulting in significant textbook cost savings for students. These resources are designed for undergraduate nursing students at the introductory level. Current topics include health assessment, communication, documentation, scholarly writing, and anti-racism.

In this summary, we highlight the Introduction to Health Assessment for the Nursing Professional resource: https://pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca/assessmentnursingmain/#main (links to the other topics can be found in the “introductory” section of this resource). This resource is a unique contribution to nursing education as it integrates inclusive approaches to health assessment and culturally-responsive techniques related to race/ethnicity, gender/sex/sexual orientation, body sizes/types, and ability/disability. A multimodal pedagogy (images/videos) was employed to support students’ learning.

The resource is informed by clinical judgement with the goal to facilitate students’ clinical decision-making and ability to prioritize care by recognizing and acting on cues of clinical deterioration. Interactive clinical judgement activities and formative assessments to evaluate learning are integrated throughout the chapters. The integration of clinical judgement throughout this resource supports students’ capacity to enhance patient safety and equitable health outcomes as well as their success in writing national nursing exams. This health assessment resource is recommended as a socially progressive text with important attention to equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility as related to health assessment content as well as open textbook design.

For more information, contact Dr. Jennifer Lapum, Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing, Toronto Metropolitan University, jlapum@torontomu.ca