Dnp In Nursing

The white paper entitled, The Doctor of Nursing Practice: Current Issues and Clarifying Recommendations was written and published by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). The AACN Board of Directors formed a task force to review and clarify the evolution of the practice doctorate in nursing as outlined in the Essentials of Doctoral Education for Advanced Nursing Practice (DNP Essentials). This paper highlights the recommendations to describe and clarify the characteristics of the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) graduate scholarship, the DNP project, efficient use of resources, program length, curriculum considerations, practice experiences, and guidelines for collaborative partnership.
In 2004, the AACN issued a Position
As with this recommendation and throughout the entire paper, the DNP Essentials provide a foundation to guide the knowledge development for these recommendations. DNP practice-scholarship is validated when the principles of nursing scholarship are combined with the eight DNP Essentials to prepare a graduate capable of improving health and care outcomes. Integrating new or developed skills can improve outcomes through organizational leadership, quality improvement processes, and translation of evidence into practice, to name a
The task force recommends that the final scholarly project be called the DNP Project to elude confusion with the term capstone. Additionally, the DNP Project is not a research dissertation, and the authors recommend against this term as well. Although all eight DNP Essentials do not have to be demonstrated in the DNP Project, the authors recommend that students have the opportunity to integrate them into practice. Surprisingly, the task force did not agree with the recommendations of all DNP Essentials. The task force suggests that an integrative and systematic review alone is not considered a DNP Project and does not afford students opportunities to develop and integrate scholarship into their practice. The task force also made clear that a student’s portfolio should not be considered a DNP