The advanced nurse practitioner. Struggling toward a conceptual framework

For our committee, the exercise of exploring the role of the nurse practitioner (as well as the roles of our other advanced practice nurses) was a welcome intellectual task. It confirmed the commitment to our programs as well as giving us an intellectual base on which we could agree, creating a unity among the diversity in our many programs, each operating on what we term (using the language first applied in nursing by Eleanor Barba, RN, EdD) "boutique design," each operating rather independently in spite of some shared courses and modules. It was rewarding to find a commonality beneath our differences. We look forward to further revision of our work by the entire faculty.