41st Annual Meeting

The healthcare crisis in the United States has resulted from high healthcare costs, poor access, limited providers for rural populations, silo approaches to practice, limited vision, and ineffective leadership often driven by a hierarchical model.  The 2011 IOM report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Practice, stresses the importance of addressing these barriers to care by optimizing the role of the nursing workforce.  The Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP)/Nurse Practitioner (NP) program presented here is based on the belief that nurse practitioners are positioned to serve as providers, leaders, visionaries, change agents, and potential entrepreneurs in creating new models for addressing the healthcare crisis.  In order to do so, the program prepares DNP/NP students with the vision and leadership skills needed to optimize the effectiveness and efficiency of interprofessional models of care.  Furthermore, the program provides DNP/NP students with the tools to overcome the intrapersonal barriers that have so often prevented them from seeing themselves as the individual capable of leading the needed change.  The attendees of this symposium will develop an understanding of how to provide curricular content that prepares DNP/NPs with such competencies.   An overview of the current trends in healthcare and three curricular content areas will be provided.  The first presentation will focus on overcoming intrapersonal barriers to achieving success and positioning themselves as leaders and entrepreneurs in healthcare. This presentation will describe a program that introduces DNP/NP students to the concept of the Imposter Syndrome.  The second presentation will offer curricular content that enables individual students to develop their own personal strategic plan for addressing the healthcare crisis. The third presentation will describe an interprofessional leadership workshop for NPs, nurse executives, physical therapists, and clinical counselors that addresses emotional intelligence, work/behavioral profiles, and conflict resolutions (Awareness Wheel). Students participate in teams that includes an unknown instigator that has been planted to derail the teamwork process. Examples of didactic content, activities, projects, practice innovations, and student outcomes will be discussed. Stories will be provided on how students have used the content to advance their roles as leaders, change agents, and entrepreneurs.