Doctor of Nursing Practice

Program Goals

  1. Prepare doctoral-level professional nurses to provide leadership and service in promoting quality, holistic nursing care.
  2. Provide a learning environment where a Christian worldview of service and leadership is integrated toward a culture of excellence for life-long learning.
  3. Promote evidence-based knowledge for integration across learning environments and the healthcare system.
  4. Provide an educational foundation for advanced nursing practice and post-doctoral study.
  5. Provide student-centered, evidence-based teaching and learning for advanced nursing practice, leadership, service and reconciliation.

Curricular Competencies

  1. Integrates nursing science with knowledge from ethics, biophysical, psychosocial, analytical, and organizational sciences as the foundation in applying the highest level of clinical reasoning and decision making for nursing practice planning and implementation of care.
  2. Uses advanced skills of written and verbal scholarly communication for leadership of quality, ethical, and safety healthcare initiatives that incorporate inter-professional collaborations to meet current and future needs of patient populations.
  3. Applies analytic methods for critical appraisal of all evidence types for translation of best practice evidence into high level nursing practice implementation through written and verbal scholarly communication.
  4. Uses information systems/technology proficiently to evaluate programs of care, outcomes of care, and care systems for quality improvement and administrative decision-making.
  5. Analyzes health care policies from the perspective of nursing and stakeholders for application to healthcare financing, regulation, access, safety, quality, and efficacy in providing high quality nursing care.
  6. Integrates effective professional written and verbal scholarly communication skills to provide leadership for interprofessional development and implementation of practice models, peer review, practice guidelines, health policy, standards of care, and/or other scholarly projects in addressing complex practice and organizational issues.
  7. Analyzes epidemiological, biostatistical, occupational, and environmental data in the development, implementation, and evaluation of culturally humble care directed toward health promotion and disease prevention.
  8. Demonstrates advanced levels of clinical assessment and judgment in designing, delivering, and evaluating evidence-based care to improve patient outcomes in primary care environments.