Abstract
BackgroundThe nurse practitioner is a growing clinical role in Australia and internationally, with an expanded scope of practice including prescribing, referring and diagnosing. However, key gaps exist in nurse practitioner education regarding governance of specialty clinical learning and teaching. Specifically, there is no internationally accepted framework against which to measure the quality of clinical learning and teaching for advanced specialty practice.MethodsA case study design will be used to investigate educational governance and capability theory in nurse practitioner education. Nurse practitioner students, their clinical mentors and university academic staff, from an Australian university that offers an accredited nurse practitioner Master’s degree, will be invited to participate in the study.Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with students and their respective clinical mentors and university academic staff to investigate learning objectives related to educational governance and attributes of capability learning. Limited demographic data on age, gender, specialty, education level and nature of the clinical healthcare learning site will also be collected. Episodes of nurse practitioner student specialty clinical learning will be observed and documentation from the students’ healthcare learning sites will be collected.Descriptive statistics will be used to report age groups, areas of specialty and types of facilities where clinical learning and teaching is observed. Qualitative data from interviews, observations and student documents will be coded, aggregated and explored to inform a framework of educational governance, to confirm the existing capability framework and describe any additional characteristics of capability and capability learning.DiscussionThis research has widespread significance and will contribute to ongoing development of the Australian health workforce. Stakeholders from industry and academic bodies will be involved in shaping the framework that guides the quality and governance of clinical learning and teaching in specialty nurse practitioner practice. Through developing standards for advanced clinical learning and teaching, and furthering understanding of capability theory for advanced healthcare practitioners, this research will contribute to evidence-based models of advanced specialty postgraduate education.
Highlights
The nurse practitioner is a growing clinical role in Australia and internationally, with an expanded scope of practice including prescribing, referring and diagnosing
The fastest growing of these models in many countries is the nurse practitioner which has almost doubled in number over a short period in Australia [1, 2]
Nurse practitioners in Australia and elsewhere are specialist clinicians educated at Master’s level who work both in the hospital and community sectors
Summary
The nurse practitioner is a growing clinical role in Australia and internationally, with an expanded scope of practice including prescribing, referring and diagnosing. They work from a nursing model of care, enhanced by legislative support to prescribe, refer and diagnose These activities enable the nurse practitioner to complete an episode of care without the need to ‘hand over’ the patient at critical points in the care trajectory, thereby providing continuity of care and improved patient outcomes. This study addresses key gaps in nurse practitioner education in relation to practice, theory and governance (quality control) in clinical learning and teaching. This study will provide a theoretically informed clinical educational model to support learning and teaching for the nurse practitioner and other hybrid advanced clinical roles
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