ABSTRACT
In the delivery of any curriculum, documentation has an educative and an administrative management function. The educative function is that it helps to organize the content and quality of the curriculum's product – which is education. The administrative function is to organize the content and quality of the means of production – which are manpower, money, materials and management. As a consequence of frequent productivity initiatives – often government inspired – that either directly affect, or have a knock-on effect upon, nurse education, changes to the means of production and therefore to the administrative documentation that models it for organizational purposes, are common. But when the IBL curriculum was introduced, it changed everything because the content and quality of the product had to alter – as well as the way in which it was produced. Thus much of the educative and administrative documentation used to manage the superseded teacher-centred educational system became either obsolete or redundant. New methods to deliver the IBL curriculum meant that new documents had to be devised, and old ones reinvented if possible or else discarded. Every rewrite of the documentation is a remodelling of the entire system of organizing the daily activities of academic and administrative staff and students – with all that this entails in terms of numbers of people, multiplicity of functions and complexity of linkages. It was the contemplation of the magnitude of this task that prompted the nomination of documentation as an IBL implementation subproject in its own right.
