Preparing Primary Care APRNs in DNP programs to Improve the Health of the Nation

The Institute of Medicine’s recent report calls for the integration of primary care and public health. This integration is necessary to forward the nation’s health agenda, improve health outcomes, and reduce health care costs. The emphasis on enhancing the numbers of primary care APRNs is necessary to increase access to care, but unless primary care APRNs gain public health knowledge and competencies, they will not be instrumental in developing and implementing the necessary population-focused strategies to meet the Healthy People 2020 goals. Primary care APRN programs are challenged to incorporate the necessary public health content into BSN to DNP curricula and remain competitive in program length. This session describes the innovative efforts of faculty at one university in incorporating public health content into the FNP curriculum for BSN to DNP students to develop the necessary competencies to meet the health needs of populations across diverse settings. Committed to building public health knowledge and skills, FNP students substitute a series of two population assessment and intervention DNP courses taught by the Public Health Nursing faculty for the two DNP core courses in health promotion and effective project planning. Course content for the population assessment and intervention courses address the appropriate AACN DNP Essentials and NONPF competencies; these courses serve as a jumping off point for BSN to DNP FNP students in developing a DNP project. Unlike post-master's DNP students, post-BSN students may not yet have the experience or skill set needed to identify a project suitable in scope early enough in their program of study to have time to plan and carry it out. DNP project examples and student and faculty feedback on the project development process to date will be shared along with lessons learned. Curricula suggestions and recommendations are provided for other programs looking to integrate public health content into DNP curricula, to help assure primary care APRNs are prepared to be effective team members in improving health outcomes for populations in their practice settings .