President's Message

The Mentor, Volume 14, Number 2, 2003

Every year I leave the NONPF annual meeting with a sense of renewal and invigoration to bring back to my home school. No other meeting throughout the year offers the same combination of high-level presentations, practical information for teaching, insight into the future issues for NP education, and genuine fellowship. It is comforting to know that, amidst much change and upheaval in higher education and health care, NONPF remains a constant value for our profession. I hope that those of you who joined us for the NONPF 29^th Annual Meeting on April 3-6, 2003, had a similar experience.

The annual meeting also offers an opportunity for renewal within the organization. Although throughout the year we try to engage the membership via e-mail and other medium to discuss important issues facing advanced practice nursing and NONPF, the annual meeting provides the most effective forum for entertaining a dialogue between the NONPF members and leaders about key issues and trends. The plenary sessions generate discussion on selected topics, and the concurrent sessions showcase members’ perspectives and strategies in teaching. This exchange is particularly helpful in providing the NONPF leadership with insight into the NP academic environment at large.

The Current Issues Forum held during this year’s meeting was particularly helpful to the leadership as we revised the format to elicit feedback from the participants on select activities within the organization. This information, coupled with the results of an e-mail membership questionnaire distributed in March, is highly useful to the NONPF Board as we prioritize our activities and plan for our upcoming 3-year strategic planning. The topics addressed in the forum and in the questionnaire are not comprehensive of NONPF activities, but they represent areas of significant resource investment relative to time and energy by the organization. Having a better understanding of the members’ perspectives on these program areas will make our efforts more effective.

Q-NONPF

An overwhelming 80% of the respondents to the membership questionnaire indicated that the Q-NONPF consultation service is a value-added service to promoting quality NP education. Members indicated that the service could be most useful for curricular assistance, clinical and preceptor issues, distance learning, and general continuous quality improvement. It is clear, though, that faculty and programs do not have sufficient information about this service. As an example, the top barrier to using the service identified by members is cost, yet the cost for levels 2 and 3 are significantly lower than a traditional educational consultant and could be built in grant proposals. NONPF will need to provide members with increased information on how this cost-effective service can be available to programs.

Criteria for Evaluation of NP Programs

While the updating and promotion of the Criteria for Evaluation of Nurse Practitioner Programs is the work of a multi-organizational task force, this initiative is also a top priority area of NONPF given the extent of time and resources we have committed to advancing this work. NONPF recently co-facilitated the recent National Task Force on Quality Nurse Practitioner Education and has provided staff support to the task force over the past year for the updating, endorsement, and printing stages of the new revision to the document. The NONPF members strongly supported the use of the evaluation criteria for the review of all NP programs within the existing accreditation structure (92% of respondents). The discussion at the annual meeting also generated comments about how NONPF should work with the accrediting bodies to ensure an ample supply of NPs as site visitors. The discussion reinforced NONPF’s ongoing priority to seek adoption of the evaluation criteria within the existing accreditation infrastructure.

Clinical/Practice Doctorate

As indicated both in the discussion during the annual meeting and in the responses from the e-mail questionnaire, the membership has significant questions about the clinical doctorate and the implications for nurse practitioner education. Particular questions centered on whether there would be a tiering of NP preparation and how the degree would differ from the PhD or DNSc. Additionally, members have expressed concerns over the confusion to the public with the introduction of different titles and degrees, the implications for the accreditation of nursing programs, and the value added to the profession. Members perceived the most significant benefits of the clinical doctorate as increasing the supply of clinical experts, faculty, and clinical leaders. The participants at the meeting identified this topic as a high level of priority for the organization. The NONPF task force studying the task force attempted to address some of the members’ questions through an article now appearing on Medscape. Further work by NONPF will focus on clarifying how the clinical/practice doctorate may relate to advance practice nursing as it evolves.

International

The membership overwhelming supports (90% of questionnaire respondents) efforts to expand the focus of NONPF to include international faculty by the addition of new membership categories and international affiliates. Discussion during the meeting highlighted the need for NONPF to be sensitive to different roles and standards of practice at the international level but reinforced the need for NONPF to be a resource for linking faculty and faculty resources at the global level. The membership was a little more mixed in thought about changing the name of the organization to reflect the broader APN focus that is more commonly recognized abroad. While a majority of the respondents supported the name change, the NONPF leadership will continue to weigh the advantages over losses to the organization by such a change.

Program of Excellence

In earlier communications with the membership this year, the NONPF leadership sought to address questions and concerns about the purpose of this proposed program. As explained, the initial conception of the Q-NONPF consultation program included a level for magnet-type recognition. This level metamorphosed into a separate program that would build on Q-NONPF in that its purpose would be to promote innovation, partnerships, and quality among NP programs. The membership response to the questionnaire and the discussion at the meeting indicated remaining questions about how to keep this recognition voluntary rather than becoming mandatory and how could it be available to programs of all types and sizes. Nevertheless, in the membership questionnaire, 70% of the respondents identified the Program of Excellence as a value-added option for promoting quality NP education. The Program of Excellence is still in a developmental stage, and the NONPF leadership will consider this feedback.

Other Priorities

The Current Issues Forum was additionally useful to the NONPF Board in highlighting additional topics that should be a priority for the organization. Some of these topics are already on the Board’s radar screen, others will guide us for the future. One priority area identified is the proliferation of subspecialties and the need to discuss how to provide certification for subspecialties under a broad specialty area. NONPF has also received communications from the National Council of State Boards of Nursing about this issue and will be supporting efforts to promote this issue. NONPF and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) emphasized the need for primary areas of certification through our annual enrollment and graduation data collection. Another topic supported by the meeting participants as a priority for NONPF is the evaluation of the competencies. NONPF is moving forward in developing a multi-faceted evaluation initiative targeted at (1) helping faculty to implement the competencies and to assess student competency, and (2) ensuring the competencies make a difference for practice outcomes.

The 30^th Annual Meeting next spring (April 22-25) will be an important meeting for continuing the dialogue about the future priorities of the organization. As we look back at 30 years of setting educational standards for NP preparation, we will be visioning the needs in education for the future. I urge the membership to lock these dates in now to be part of the meeting. In the meantime, we will all continue our exchange of ideas and our work through the electronic network we have developed. This network enables us to keep connected throughout the year, but the electronic exchange does not yield the high return we get on the individual and organizational levels from our annual meeting of the minds.