Nursing Evidence Based Practice

Staff Education Program Checklist

The Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) student is responsible for complying with the site’s policies and requirements regarding the DNP project. The DNP student must follow the steps in the 2021 DNP Project Process Guide for students following the 2021 DNP Program of Study while working on the DNP project. The resources for the DNP project are located on the Office of Research and Doctoral Studies DNP Doctoral Study page.

The DNP student must be actively enrolled in the doctoral mentoring study course shell (NURS 8702 or 8703) to participate in any activities related to the project.

Staff Education Projects

· Staff education projects must align with the purpose of the project and project outcome identified on the Staff Education Site Approval Form.

· The project must follow the steps in the DNP Project Process Guide.

· Staff education may include nurse residencies, orientation, in-service education, and continuing education of professional staff. Programs may be multidisciplinary in nature, meaning that other professional healthcare clinicians may attend and benefit from the content. Staff education is usually developed to meet a need identified by a site or clinical practice setting to improve patient care, achieve standards of practice, or to meet regulatory guidelines.

· For the DNP nurse, staff education is often used to help inform and improve knowledge and skills using current evidence-based practices to facilitate improvement in healthcare and nursing practice to affect positive social change.

· The project management action plan should include milestones and tasks for the ADDIE phases of analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation for the staff education project (https://educationaltechnology.net/the-addie-model-instructional-design/).

· Evaluation should be formative and summative. Formative evaluation should be conducted during the development of the program while summative evaluation occurs after implementation to assess the outcome of the education program. If a student is developing a comprehensive program that will be conducted over several months and needs organization approval prior to implementation, the student may develop the program and complete a formative evaluation with stakeholders. Examples of these types of programs include a critical care education program or a nurse residency program.

· DNP students may not develop scholarly projects that involve patients, families, or pre-professional students as their target population.

· The evaluation should identify the program’s impact on social change as an outcome.

Ethical Requirements for Staff Education Doctoral Projects

In the doctoral project documents, the doctoral student must change the name of any partner sites and generalize the location(s) so that the site(s) is not identifiable. The student must redact any information that will lead a reader to identify the site. The site must decide if the project should be publicized. The doctoral student is required to change the name of the site in all materials (including drafts shared with peers and faculty members) to protect the site’s identity. In some cases, the doctoral student will need to maintain confidentiality by removing key pieces of evidence and/or data that might give away the site’s identity.

The DNP student

· may not collect any type of data from patients or patients’ family members for this type of project;

· is responsible for ensuring that no proprietary, sensitive, or confidential information is disclosed in the doctoral project document; and

· is responsible for complying with all of the site’s policies. This includes, but is not limited to, site QI policies and site resource use policies (pertaining to copying/printing materials, etc.).

DNP Action Planning Tool

· Using this checklist, identify critical milestones and tasks on the Action Planning Tool. All milestones and tasks must be written as SMART objectives. Review the chapters below for assistance with developing milestones and tasks. This checklist should be submitted into MyDR with the Action Planning Tool.

· Resources

· Dang, D., Dearholt, S., Bissett, K., Ascenzi, J., &Whalen, M. (2022). Johns Hopkins evidence-based practice: Model and guidelines (4th ed.). Sigma.

· Sipes, C. (2020). Project management for the advanced practice nurse (2nd ed.) Springer.

· White, K., Dudley-Brown, S., & Terhaar, M. (2021). Translation of evidence into nursing and healthcare (3rd ed.) Springer.

DNP Staff Education Project Action Planning Tool Checklist

Student’s Name: Student ID:

Committee Members

Faculty Advisor:

Member:

University Research Reviewer:

Completed

Steps

Committee Comments

Phase 1: Design

Completed

Site has been approved by the program director.

Completed

Question Development Tool and Synthesis Process and Recommendations Tool have been completed and reviewed by the faculty advisor.

Phase 2: Plan

Participants – All nurses, physicians, and pharmacists at the facility will take part in the mandatory education program. The program will run for 1 year, beginning with nurses for the first six months, then pharmacists and physicians for the next six months. The staff will be invited to participate in the education program through email as well as an internal memo signed by the CEO that will be displayed at strategic places within the hospital.

Delivery – The six-week program will involve weekly three-hour training sessions where participants will be educated on crucial medication safety themes, including the eight rights of medication administration, dose calculations, medication sensitivity, error management strategies, and international patient safety guidelines.

Equipment – The facility will provide the equipment, including laptops, cameras, and projectors, that the trainers will use. Participants will make personal arrangements for the gadgets they use for training, although those with no access to personal computers or smartphones can use the computers available in the facility. Costs to be incurred in producing the training material, including printing and photocopy expenses will be funded as part of the DNP project.

Program objectives – Objectives are written using SMART objective guidelines in DNP project process guides. The DNP project pursues three objectives:

To reduce the incidence of medication errors at the facility by 50% by the end of the first year of project implementation

To increase the patient satisfaction index by 30 percent by the end of the first year of project implementation

To improve the hospital’s reputation as measured by public ranking by 25 percent by the end of the first year

Education program – Themes to be covered as part of the teaching content will include the eight rights of medication administration, dose calculations, medication sensitivity, error management strategies, and international patient safety guidelines. The training will be conducted through a combination of webinars and on-site lessons. Participants will also have access to physical copies of the training booklet to read at their free time. The trainers will administer an assessment at the end of every month to test participants’ understanding. The expected outcome is that participants will be more knowledgeable and display an enhanced understanding of medication errors in their daily working and decision-making.