Content in nurse practitioner education - A scoping review

Globally, the role of nurse practitioner is evolving to meet increased healthcare demands. Nevertheless, there are factors hindering the development of this role, one of which involves differences in nurse practitioner education worldwide. Therefore, the objective of the present study is to identify what is known in the research field on the content of nurse practitioner educational programmes.

The literature scoping review follows a six-stage methodological framework including: i) formulate research questions, ii) identify relevant studies, iii) select studies, iv) chart data, v) collate, summarize and report the results, vi) consultations. Data bases searched included CINAHL, PubMed and ERIC and were followed by manual searching of reference list in the included papers. Of the 1553 papers identified, 16 met the aim of this study.

To answer the research questions 'what is the content of curricula in nurse practitioner education?' a deductive content analysis was used.

Two main categories emerged. The first was related to the professional nurse practitioner role and includes research and nursing theories, leadership and collaboration, and organizational, political, economic, regulatory and legislative issues. The second is related to becoming an autonomous practitioner and includes health promotion and disease prevention, and other medically oriented content.

The content identified is consistent with the core competencies that nurse practitioners are expected to have after graduation, which have been described by the International Council of Nurses and by other researchers. Given the lack of recent research in nurse practitioner education, the results of the present study advance knowledge in this research field. Additionally, this study may be of practical value in developing new nurse practitioner educational programmes.