From tragedy to triumph in the rural western US with 2 psychiatric nurse practitioner programs

Two state funded schools of Nursing each had a psychiatric nurse practitioner program. These programs were "voluntarily forced" to collaborate together when the sudden tragic deaths of 2 key faculty members fromone university which left behind only one psychiatric advanced practice nurse faculty in the established, yet young, Psych NP Program. What emerged from this tragedy was a triumph of collaboration across 2 states with significant rural and urban underserved areas that are both extremely short of psychiatric providers and psychiatric Nurse Practitioner faculty. We developed a collaborative curricular model that combined online materials, Panopto taping of lectures for students prior to class, and in-class seminars in a distance intensive model that spans across rural and urban areas of the two states. We will discuss the many pros and cons of how we accomplished this collaboration, including policy issues, many financial issues, faculty workload issues, and student registration issues. We will also discuss how we developed creative clinical placements throughout the region, online supervision strategies and standardized patient scenarios and case study seminars to facilitate clinical reasoning. Consistent with the APRN consensus model, we will discuss how we implemented a family psychiatric NP curricular program in both universities, using resources from tertiary care settings, private practice settings, public mental health settings, and multi-disciplinary support. We will end with a panel discussion of all of the symposium participants and the audience to discuss what we did "right", what we would change, and suggestions for future collaborations. We will end with an interactive section to take questions from the audience about concerns or specific issues. Our accomplishments and challenges may be a help to states with significant psychiatric Nurse Practitioner faculty and provider shortages and how we are succeeding to increase access to psychiatric care in the West.