Blueprint for a Palliative Advanced Practice Registered Nurse Fellowship (TH303)

Abstract

•Describe the landscape of advanced practice fellowships in palliative and non-palliative nursing.•Examine blueprint for palliative APRN fellowship design.•Evaluate feasibility and readiness to start a fellowship at home institution using an interactive process. As Americans age they are developing an ever-increasing frequency of complex co-morbid medical conditions. In order to care for seriously-ill and dying Americans, there is a critical need for palliative care (PC) specialty-trained advanced practice registered nurses (APRN). Unfortunately, there is minimal PC content integrated within undergraduate and graduate nursing academics. Moreover, post-graduate residencies or fellowships in palliative nursing are extremely limited. Fellowships for APRNs have begun to emerge across many specialties, including oncology and critical care. These training programs provide successful models for clinical immersion and mentorship that launch careers for new-to-practice clinicians, as well as practitioners transitioning into new specialties. In PC training, there is a disparity between the number of hospice and palliative medicine fellowships and the handful of fellowships offered for palliative APRNs. There is opportunity for collaboration and sharing of resources to expand these existing programs into rich, interprofessional fellowships with the goal of growing the PC workforce. However, guidance in developing or revising curricula to train the palliative APRN is lacking. In this session, attendees will review frameworks for APRN fellowships both within and outside our PC specialty. Faculty—including one palliative APRN fellowship director, one palliative APRN, and one Accreditation Program Director at the American Nurses Credentialing Center—will review the landscape of advance practice fellowships. Faculty will also share lessons learned to help PC educators who are eager to design programs. This blueprint includes the necessary infrastructure, stakeholders, professional standards, opportunities for funding, curricula, and competency evaluation to build a fellowship. Attendees will be tasked to review the status of each domain in their home institution and assess readiness to support a fellowship using a case study and evaluation tools. Eventually, these pioneering efforts will grow into more programs at which point an accreditation process to distinguish quality programs will be necessary.