With the increased life expectancy, older adults will interact with multiple health care providers to manage acute and chronic conditions. These interactions include nursing students who use various health care settings to meet the clinical practicum requirements of their programs. Nursing faculty are charged with facilitating students' learning throughout the program from basic human needs, to holistic communication, to advanced medical surgical concepts. Despite educating students on holistic communication, there remains a lack of a reliable framework to undertake the task of teaching holistic communication skills. Nursing students preparing to function as licensed practitioners need to develop appropriate knowledge to holistically care for older adults. The purpose of this article is to examine Hildegard Peplau's interpersonal relations theory as a framework to assist nursing students to understand holistic communication skills during their encounters with older adults. Peplau's theory provides nursing a useful set of three interlocking and oftentimes overlapping working phases for nurses' interaction with patients in the form of the nurse-patient relationship. Nursing education could adopt the three phases of Peplau's interpersonal relations theory to educate students on holistically communicating with older adults.

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Nursing education literature is replete with anecdotal accounts of continual struggle with curriculum content saturation. Recent calls, however, for transformation of nursing education have challenged nurse educators to explore innovative pedagogies and consider sweeping changes in the way future nurses are educated. In order to meet the needs of todays health care consumer, nursing education must move away from teacher-centered learning environments to one where students have the primary responsibility and play an active role in their learning. Concept-based teaching (CBT) pedagogies are a novel approach to educating students. Grounded in a constructivist learning theory, CBT allows faculty to build upon students' prior experiences and acquired knowledge from previous educational endeavors. Concepts that are applicable to multiple care settings are introduced by faculty early in the nursing program and are reinforced with exemplars. The change to CBT is a change in the pedagogical approaches with which faculty are unfamiliar. With student centered learning environments, minimal lecturing, and the increase use of collaborate teamwork, faculty must begin the transition to CBT. The Bridges change model includes three phases that can be used as a framework for identifying strategies to successfully transition to CBT. The use of reflective teaching practice strategies may also enhance the transition to CBT.

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