Nursing Education Systems in Korea, China and the United States of America and its Future Directions

Korea, the land of morning calm, and the People’s Republic of China, known as the sleeping dragon in the East, shares several commonalities. They not only share the same continent, but also value similar eastern cultures that strongly inherited by the Confucianism from a single ancient ancestor. Not only that, they both received their nursing traditions from European and the American missionaries in the late 1800’s (Lin, 1938; Davis, Gan, Lin & Olesen, 1992; Chan & Wong, 1999; Lee, 1984). However, the stages of nursing education development and its standards are not same among three countries. They have gone through various internal socio-political, hierarchical changes which impact development of its nursing education systems in the past. Even today, professional education and practice are confronting major changes in health care, which are affected by political and socioeconomic world. Korea is coming out from long dark tunnel of financial crisis. They are striving for an improvement on educations. Making reforms in health care delivery system to keep up with the international trends in order to survive in the highly competitive global village. China is also making reforms and opening up to foreign countries to catch up with what they had missed in the past. They are adopting not only medical technologies and engineering but organizational systems and knowledge. They are waking up from a long Nursing Education Systems in Korea, China and the United States of America and its Future Directions