Teaching Roles of the Advanced

Teaching Roles of the Advanced Nursing Practitioner

Advanced nursing practitioners are crucial to the success of nursing strategies. They embody a wide variety of roles. Yet, one in particular is crucial -- their roles as an educator within the field and in the classroom.

There are a wide variety of multi-faceted teaching roles an advanced nurse practitioner embodies. Advanced nurse practitioners often work within an educational field, either teaching nursing students in an academic setting, or guiding new nurses in field practice. Thus, they play a huge role in the education of the future nursing workforce. Part of this education involves key strategies, especially revolving around preventative care. According to the research, "one hallmark of APRN practice is the provision of care directed at illness prevention, health promotion, and improved patient care outcomes" (Fitzgerald et al., 2012, p 2). Thus, advanced nurse practitioners can help augment other educational strategies by illustrating new and relevant strategies in field practice to new nurses and students. Advanced nurse practitioners can use their own knowledge and skill to help show case studies in actual field practice, as well as in theoretical conceptions. The advanced nurse practitioner is crucial in nursing education because they help link theory and practice.

Moreover, teaching is not always limited to guiding nursing students or new nurses, but also often includes working with patients themselves to educate them on their conditions and how to best care for their own health, both in and outside the context of a health care facility. Weber (2006) shows how advanced nurse practitioners must help guide patients, teaching them to become active and responsible participants in their strategies of care. Such guidance allows patients to better care for themselves in the absence of a nurse practitioner or physician. This allows for greater home recovery times, and often more effective preventative measures that help the patient avoid future care needs. The advanced nurse practitioner must get patients to take responsibility for their own actions and help them better serve their own health needs. Additionally, "one of the other responsibilities in which NPs try to have patients involved is planning for the patients' own safety" (Weber, 2006, p 346). This includes training for safety measures outside the context of the health care facility, like in the residential bathroom and kitchen, where the most accidents can occur. Such responsibility training can be augmented through home visits, where the advanced nurse practitioner can work to illustrate the safest and most responsible methods within the patients' own home environment. Patients need to be proactive within the implementation of their own health care strategies. Thus, the advanced nurse practitioner becomes a teacher who can facilitate the learning process, allowing the patient to become a responsible participant in their own care, rather than just an uneducated observer in their own lives.

The history and development of advanced nursing practice is incredibly complex. Advanced practice nurses have had to overcome a number of major barriers in the past. Nursing education has developed a long way in a relatively short period of time. The most practical nursing education facilities began in the 1800s, but minimal education standards were not put into place until 1923, when the Goldmark Report highlighted the need for certain educational certifications for nursing practice (Scheckel, 2011). An educational philosophy began to develop shortly after, with education becoming a primary role for many advanced nursing practitioners. By the late 1940s, education for nursing was pushed out of vocational training in the field and began to require nurses going to colleges and higher education facilities in order to receive a more appropriate and in-depth education (Scheckel, 2011). Since then, there have been more developments which have specialized the roles and practice of the advanced nursing practitioner as a primary educator for nursing students and new nurses in the field. Today, there are a decreasing number of advanced nursing practitioners working as educators to teach future nursing staff. Yet this is occurring with a huge increase of nursing students, challenging the educators to have to deal with more students with less help from educational colleagues (Fitzgerald et al., 2012). This remains one of the crucial issues that contemporary advanced nursing practitioners must face and overcome. Given their stellar reputation from past practice, many working in the field will find innovative ways to meet increasing student demands while still remaining relevant in the field.