Integrating Design Thinking Competencies Into a Community Health Nursing Course: Creative Problem-Solving Around the Healthy People National 2030 Goals

Design thinking (DT) has evolved as a human-centered framework for solving problems in a number of industries including health care and education. Users of DT move through a multistep dynamic process involving five stages: empathy, problem identification, ideation, prototyping, and testing. This article highlights one program’s efforts to operationalize DT into the undergraduate nursing curriculum as a project-based learning strategy in a senior class. This educational innovation works to develop advanced critical thinking and problem-solving competencies for approximately 450 nursing students each academic year and has been taking place since 2019.