NURS 8100 Week 1 Discussion The Doctoral Degree and Professional Nursing Practice

I really admire how dedicated you are to patient care. It is clear that this is something you feel strongly about.  There is no better time than now to undertake your earning your doctoral degree. If I have one regret, it is that I did not do it earlier. I see young nurses go directly from a masters program to a doctoral one, and I cannot even imagine the positive impact they will have on our profession. As a nurse with an advanced degree, it means that you are taking on the role of providing growth and knowledge to the base of nursing. It means that you challenge the status quo using science and philosophy, use qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methodologies to support the science, and provide safe, evidence-based care to the patient, family, and community (Zaccagnini, & White, 2014). To be a nurse with an advanced degree in research or practice means that you have the knowledge base and skill set to affect the way nursing is viewed as a profession (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2006). It means that you listen to the bedside nurse and hear wat they find as obstacles or questions of practice and answer them. It means that you are a subject matter expert in the profession of nursing or research and that you will endeavor to get those questions answered to the best of your ability utilizing both scientific methodologies as well as philosophical methodologies (McEwen, & Wills, 2014). A nurse who holds a different degree may just use concrete types of thinking, but the advanced degree nurse uses both concrete and abstract thinking to find solutions and answers (Gray, Grove, & Sutherland, 2017). The expectations associated with a doctoral degree, whether a DNP or a  PhD researcher is the assumption that best practice via evidence or research about an identified practice problem will be implemented at the bedside or to result in better patient outcomes. Evidenced based practice nformation will be disseminated to the RNs to put into practice or to understand the needed change in practice (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2006). Was it a difficult decision to decide which educational route you wanted to take? Who do you feel influenced you the most?

References

American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). (2006). The essentials of doctoral education for advanced nursing practice. Washington, DC: Retrieved from http://www.aacn.nche.edu/DNP/pdf/Essentials.pdf  Gray, J. R., Grove, S. K., and Sutherland, S. (2017). Burns and Grove’s the practice of nursing research: Appraisal, Synthesis, and Generation of Evidence (8th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Saunders Elsevier. Laureate Education (Producer). (2011). Introduction: The doctor of nursing practice [Video file]. Available from https://class.waldenu.edu  Zaccagnini, M. E., & White, K. W. (2014). The doctor of nursing practice essentials: A new model for advanced practice nursing (2nd ed.). Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett. [Vital Source e-reader]