Background: The nurse practitioner is a growing clinical role in Australia and internationally, with an expanded\nscope of practice including prescribing, referring and diagnosing. However, key gaps exist in nurse practitioner\neducation regarding governance of specialty clinical learning and teaching. Specifically, there is no internationally\naccepted framework against which to measure the quality of clinical learning and teaching for advanced specialty\npractice.\nMethods: A case study design will be used to investigate educational governance and capability theory in nurse\npractitioner education. Nurse practitioner students, their clinical mentors and university academic staff, from an\nAustralian university that offers an accredited nurse practitioner Master�s degree, will be invited to participate in the\nstudy.\nSemi-structured interviews will be conducted with students and their respective clinical mentors and university\nacademic staff to investigate learning objectives related to educational governance and attributes of capability\nlearning. Limited demographic data on age, gender, specialty, education level and nature of the clinical healthcare\nlearning site will also be collected. Episodes of nurse practitioner student specialty clinical learning will be observed\nand documentation from the students� healthcare learning sites will be collected.\nDescriptive statistics will be used to report age groups, areas of specialty and types of facilities where clinical\nlearning and teaching is observed. Qualitative data from interviews, observations and student documents will be\ncoded, aggregated and explored to inform a framework of educational governance, to confirm the existing\ncapability framework and describe any additional characteristics of capability and capability learning.\nDiscussion: This research has widespread significance and will contribute to ongoing development of the\nAustralian health workforce. Stakeholders from industry and academic bodies will be involved in shaping the\nframework that guides the quality and governance of clinical learning and teaching in specialty nurse practitioner\npractice. Through developing standards for advanced clinical learning and teaching, and furthering understanding\nof capability theory for advanced healthcare practitioners, this research will contribute to evidence-based models of\nadvanced specialty postgraduate education.
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