Closing the Provider Gap in Rural and Underserved Communities: Preparing Family Nurse Practitioner Students for Entry-to-Practice.

BACKGROUND: Health care disparities in rural and underserved areas necessitate quality primary care, especially in behavioral health management. Family nurse practitioners (FNPs) are critical in these regions, which often lack psychiatric specialists. PROBLEM: Rural communities face unique challenges exacerbated by primary care and mental health provider shortages. The deficit in behavioral health specialists highlights the need to optimize FNP education programs. APPROACH: The Collaborative Academic Practice (CAP) program prepares FNP students for entry-to-practice through hybrid learning, immersive training, and comprehensive behavioral health integration, effectively training them to meet the health care needs of underserved populations. OUTCOMES: The CAP program prepares FNPs, resulting in increased practice in underserved areas and enhanced preceptor satisfaction. Key measures contribute to its effectiveness, including immersive training, telehealth education, and preceptor enhancement. CONCLUSIONS: Despite financial and communication challenges, the CAP program transforms FNP education, addressing mental health needs and bridging critical gaps in health care delivery.

Utilizing a HRSA Training Grant to Promote PMHNP Student Resilience: Answering the Call to Enhance Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning Practices in Nursing Education.

Nursing burnout has reached a new level of prevalence among professionals and is rising among nursing students and can impact student success in the classroom and clinical areas. Among advanced practice nurses, psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioners have the least favorable combination of low compassion satisfaction and high secondary traumatic stress, placing them at even greater risk for burnout compared to other specialties. Trauma informed teaching and learning principles can serve to prevent burnout and have a positive impact on learning outcomes. Through these teaching methods, nurse educators have the opportunity to both support students during their nursing education and prepare students for the professional stressors that contribute to burnout. This quality improvement project involved implementation and evaluation of a HRSA funded program to train PMHNP students interested in working in rural and underserved areas. The training intervention included didactic curricular enhancements, a trauma resiliency training and a longitudinal clinical practicum. Qualitative program outcomes indicated that trainees were implementing trauma-informed principles and skills with patients and for self-care during their nursing training and at one year follow-up. The program may offer practical upstream solutions for nurse educators and future studies should explore concepts more formally to develop best practice models.

Teaching a Systems Approach: An Innovative Quality Improvement Project.

BACKGROUND: Nurse practitioners are required to navigate complex health care systems. Quality improvement (QI) projects provide the opportunity for nurse practitioner students to learn systems knowledge and improve health care outcomes in patient populations. A gap in the literature exists around how to systematically teach, apply, and measure QI curricular objectives at the master's level. METHOD: Six faculty evaluated the QI project for the psychiatric nurse practitioner master's program by identifying the most challenging QI concepts for students to apply, revising their teaching strategies to address gaps, and retrospectively evaluating the outcomes of these curriculum changes by comparing student outcomes before and after the curricular changes. RESULTS: A significant difference was noted on QI project performance between students in the 2014 and 2015 graduating classes, measured by the scores earned on students' final papers (t[92] = 1.66, p = .05, d = .34, r(2) = .0289). CONCLUSION: Theoretical principles of adult and cooperative learning were used to inform curricular changes to enhance student's acquisition of QI skills.