NR 500 Week 4 Assignment: APN Professional Development Plan Paper
NR 500 Week 4 Assignment: APN Professional Development Plan Paper
Advanced
... [Show More] Practitioner Nursing Professional Development Goals and Plans
Family Nurse Practitioner Program, Chamberlain University
NR500NP: Foundational Concepts and Applications
APN Professional Development Plan
Advanced practice nursing scope of practice and regulations, required competencies, and role vary state to state. I will be breaking down the criteria for the nurse practitioner role in Ohio, as well as depicting what I’ll need to do to prepare for this new career. In addition, I will review a few of the nurse practitioner core competencies and how they contribute to advanced practice nursing. Having the ability to self-evaluate one’s own strengths and weakness within these competencies is the gateway to improving one’s practice. Furthermore, I will be identifying key leadership skills salient to the workplace and quality care and being able to construct strategies to develop weaker skills. The goal is to have a complete understanding of being a nurse practitioner in Ohio and what I need to do to best prepare for my future role.
APN Scope of Practice
Post-graduation I plan to stay and practice in Ohio. I have met many wonderful plastic surgeons here and cannot wait for the opportunity to shadow once the covid-19 quarantines lift. Dermatology and plastics are primarily considered a non-essential field and many of their procedures and treatments have been put on hold. Being that Ohio has limited or reduced NP practice, my role working in this specialty won’t change much if I were to move to another state that had unrestricted or restricted practice (AANP, 2020). In Ohio it is required to have a valid RN license, graduate nursing degree from an accredited university, and national certification, to apply for your APRN license through the governing Ohio board of nursing (Advanced practice, 2015).
Nurse practitioners can have prescriptive authority in Ohio, but in order to do so, must fulfill another set of requirements. These requirements consist of taking an advanced pharmacology course with a minimum of 45 contact hours in the NP’s specialty and in some cases an externship of 1,500 hours (Advanced practice, 2015). Once completed the APRN can apply for their prescriptive authority license (Ohio board of nursing, 2019). It is the nurse practitioner’s responsibility to comply with regulatory guidelines for prescribing medications and to stay updated with any license changes.
Nurse Practitioner (NONPF) Core Competencies
Competency Strengths
With becoming a nurse practitioner comes much more autonomy, making it that much more important for the nurse practitioner have strong core competencies and be confident in their practice. Two of the competencies I feel confident in are the quality competencies and the scientific foundation competencies. Part of what I love about nursing is the privilege of being able to help someone else. Seeing a difference in them and their resulting happiness, satisfies something in me, and in turn makes me happy. These two competencies go hand in hand. By integrating research and using evidence-based practice, I can translate the latest research informing me what is best practice and use that information within my own practice. We do this now as RNs and will continue to pursue these core values as APRN’s.
Competency weaknesses and plans
After nursing school, I immediately began working as a surgical nurse. Many of what were taught as foundational RN core competencies in school, I feel have been lost solely because alternative skills are necessary in the operating room. The RN competencies are steppingstones to APRN core competencies and therefor I feel unprepared in the following: health delivery system competencies and policy competencies. In order to strengthen health delivery system competencies, I will be utilizing my clinical preceptor as a mentor to teach and guide me how to collaborate interprofessionally, utilize organizational delivery systems, learn about financial constraints, and the other aspects of this competency group. I am a very hands on learner and having a mentor has been shown to be a great framework with which to teach these skills (Hodges et al., 2019). Also, available are specialized mentorships for topics like prescribing and signing orders, if further mentoring is needed and or desired.
As for becoming more familiar with policies, my goal throughout the program will be to make note and look up policies that pertain to the material I’m learning or facility I am in. This is a tactic that has worked well within my current role and I have successful held myself accountable for learning my facilities policies. For those in my department who have been there several years and are already familiar with many of our policies, our department leaders will update us monthly at our staff meetings if there have been any changes to a policy. A recent example is that policy stated we could begin cleaning the OR (tying trash bags, breaking down the tables, and wiping equipment) if we were at least three feet from the patient. AORN guidelines came out with a new criterion stating we are to now wait until the patient is carted out of the OR before this process can begin. Now only the handful of us who receive the AORN handbook were aware of this change, it wasn’t until our monthly staff meeting came and our nurse leaders announced our policy changed to adjust to best practice. Now while our department only has monthly meetings, our nurse leaders are very good at communication to our entire department, regardless of shift and team, the same information and abiding by the same practices.
Leadership Skills
Healthcare professionals are ever adapting to the complexity of the healthcare world. We are constantly learning, evolving, inventing and must adjust our practices to keep up. Strong leadership is what helps drive the change effectively and hopefully smoothly. To be an effective leader one possesses emotional intelligence, advanced communication skills, and can build respected relationships (Canadian College of Health Leaders, 2010). Emotional intelligence means knowing how to identify your own emotions, how to regulate them, and how others are perceiving them (Kumar et al., 2014). Having emotional intelligence goes along with advanced communication skills. Having a deeper awareness of yourself and attention to detail around you will enhance the level of communication you’re at currently, and over time these skills will become more proficient. These skills in turn help one to foster relationships, building a more unified workplace between coworkers, and increasing patient satisfaction (Waterbury, 2016).
One way in which a nurse practitioner student can develop these skills is to observe how their preceptor interacts with peers and patients. Identify nonverbal cues and how the practitioner responds to different types of reactions, as well as their bodily stance. Note the use of open ended and positive language to gather information from the patients. They can also learn how to speak in a calm, clear spoken tone and what speed of speaking is appropriate. Overtime paying extra attention and listening will form these better communication characteristics into second nature and the student won’t have to actively think as much about what to say and how to say it.
Another tactic for developing leadership skills is through mentoring. The student could take additional leadership courses or become more proactive with their preceptor and allow the mentoring to be more of a two-way teaching. Mentoring is a wonderful resource that can allow the student to have as much or as little structure as they want to prepare them for transforming into the NP role. Being able to discuss with a mentor your concerns and receiving constructive feedback, then forming a game plan on how to implement improvements will be key to their success.
Conclusion
Reviewed in this paper was the pathway for a nurse practitioner student in the state of Ohio, as well as, the nurse practitioners’ scope of practice, required competencies, and characteristics of leadership. We discussed the value of having a good knowledge base involving the practitioner’s specialty scope of practice and the necessary skills required. Also noted was the saliency of emotional intelligence, advanced communication skills, and fostering relationships to create a desirable work atmosphere for both patients and coworkers. Having these strong leadership values and being a positive, confident figure leads to better team fluency and increased patient satisfaction. Each of the improvement strategies discussed are ones that I will utilize and benefit from throughout this program and ideally after. Learning does not end when a degree is completed, learning continues to cultivate over time and having that understanding is what will strengthen my practice and influence as a provider.
References
Advanced practice registered nurse license requirements in Ohio. (2015). In nursinglicensure.org. Retrieved from https://www.nursinglicensure.org/np-state/ohio-nurse-practitioner.html
Canadian College of Health Leaders (2010). Key points to leadership growth. A checklist for leaders. Retrieved from http://leadscanada.net/uploaded/web/Resources/key_points/KEYPOINTS_2016_EN .pdf
DeNisco, S.M. & Barker, A. M. (2015). Advanced practice nursing: Essential knowledge for the profession (3rd ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Hodges, A. L., Konicki, A. J., Talley, M. H., Bordelon, C. J., Holland, A. C., & Galin, S. F. (2019, November). Competency-based education in transitioning nurse practitioner students from education into practice. Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, 31(11), 675-683. doi:10.1097/JXX.0000000000000327
Information and Resources for Ohio NPs. (2020). In AANP American association of nurse practitioners. Retrieved from https://www.aanp.org/advocacy/ohio
Kumar, S., Adhish, V., & Chauhan, A. (2014). Managing self for leadership. Indian Journal of Community Medicine, 39(3), 138-142. doi: 10.4103/0970-0218.137148
National Organization of Nurse Practitioner Faculties. (2017). Nurse practitioner core competencies content. Retrieved from https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.nonpf.org/resource/resmgr/competencies/2017_NPCo reComps_with_Curric.pdf
Prescribing resources. (2019). In Ohio board of nursing. Retrieved from https://nursing.ohio.gov/practice-resources/prescribing-resources/
Waterbury, S. (2016, August). Transform your leadership. Nursing management, 47(8), 53-54. doi:doi: 10.1097/01.NUMA.0000488866.63732.dd [Show Less]