Education DNP

DNP Much has been written about the current nursing shortage and its impact upon the healthcare profession as a whole: with too few nurses on call, existing staff members are forced to work longer and later hours. This inevitably contributes to medical errors, burnout, and, ironically enough, poorer retention rates of experienced nurses. The nursing shortage thus can become a self-perpetuating cycle. The more unpleasant the conditions, the fewer and fewer nurses wish to remain in the profession and fewer people want to enter the profession.

This state of affairs will only worsen in the future as more baby boomers are likely to retire from nursing. However, the source of the shortage is not simply a lack of willing and able candidates: nursing schools admit that they turn away many potentially qualified candidates year after year. With a shortage of nursing faculty, institutions have no other choice. A lack of funding for students also acts as a limitation upon qualified candidates' ability to obtain nursing degrees, including advanced degrees.

With this problem in mind I seek to obtain a DNP (a Doctorate in Nursing Practice) to specifically address some of the crises affecting nursing education. The profession demands motivated and qualified DNPs who can find creative solutions to the problems currently affecting nursing education. I believe that ultimately everything begins with education: without addressing the problems specific to teaching nursing and nursing students, the serious issues in the field of healthcare as a whole cannot be resolved.

New nurses must also be educated to better cope with technology and the increased demands placed upon their critical thinking skills in the modern healthcare environment. Budgetary cutbacks mean that more healthcare organizations are relying upon nurses to provide care once relegated to other healthcare professions. Student nurses themselves want more up-to-date, hands-on, and sophisticated introductions to the nursing profession earlier on in their educations, given their awareness of the future challenges they face.

My specific desired topic which I intend to pursue is the need for quality improvement in nursing education. In the past, there has been a tendency to focus upon quality assurance in nursing education (i.e., enforcing punitive sanctions when students or faculty failed to meet a particular, predetermined standard). Quality improvement is a more holistic and positive philosophy, stressing the need to be constantly improving how education is disseminating and reforming.