Doctor of Nursing Practice programs: opportunities for faculty development.

This article examines development opportunities for faculty teaching in Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) programs. Although faculty development for DNP programs is similar to that of other academic programs, faculty may need different strategies for teaching, scholarship, and service because DNP programs focus on translation of science into practice, systems-level changes, clinical scholarship, and the highest levels of advanced nursing practice. Faculty and student collaboration across DNP and PhD programs provide new approaches for translating research into practice and generating practice questions in need of further scientific development. Specific faculty development strategies for facilitating this collaboration are essential. Capstone projects pose special opportunities for faculty development due to the integration of these projects within diverse practice environments, with differing expectations, regulations, and pacing compared with research. Linking new care delivery models with health informatics is expected to facilitate rapid translation of research and development of improvements in practice.

Improving the academic programming process in a school of nursing using computational modeling and simulation.

In recent years, academic institutions have been challenged to search for new methods to provide high quality education and research at an affordable cost. This study used a unique methodology, computational modeling and simulation, to investigate faculty productivity at a school of nursing from 2004 till 2007. A model of the academic programming process was built in Arena, a discrete event simulation software package. The model predicted significant improvements in baseline faculty percent effort (PE) after reducing variation in class distribution throughout the week, combining classes with enrollment of 10 or less, adding additional faculty and standardizing PE policies. Performance metrics for faculty productivity showed significant improvement post implementation of recommendations in 2007.