Hospital-based nurse practitioner roles and interprofessional practice: a scoping review

This scoping review provides current global understanding of the rapidly evolving nurse practitioner role within hospital settings, and considers the level of understanding of its enactment within interprofessional teamwork. Arksey and O'Malley's framework was used to explore recent primary research, reviews, and gray literature in two ways. First, hospital-based nurse practitioner literature was mapped to country of origin, and thematically summarized. Second, clearly developed and consistently defined key interprofessional concepts were identified in the interprofessional literature then conceptually mapped to the nurse practitioner studies by their operationalization. The nurse practitioner review located 103 abstracts. Twenty-nine, originating from four countries, met the inclusion criteria. The interprofessional concept review identified a total of 137 relevant abstracts, however, only ten met the inclusion criteria. Understanding the nurse practitioner role within hospital teams remains limited due to a small number of countries producing evidence, the lack of nurse practitioner role title standardization hindering consistent knowledgebase development, and limited application and inconsistent operationalization of concepts within nurse practitioner research. Research focused on role enactment is needed to understand the uniqueness of the hospital-based nurse practitioner role.