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The Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner (AG-ACNP) Program is designed to prepare nurses for Advanced Practice in providing acute care and critical care for patients from adolescence to end of life. The AG-ACNP practices across all settings in providing restorative care for acute illness and acute exacerbations of chronic disease. While most AG-ACNPs practice in the hospital setting, others may practice in specialty clinics.
The AG-ACNP curriculum has been designed to provide intensive preparation for the nurse practitioner to enter practice in a critical care, hospital, or clinic based setting. The courses build on the knowledge gained in undergraduate nursing education and the experiences of providing direct acute and critical care at the bedside. This experience is crucial to success in the program.
Didactic preparation with extensive human patient simulation and extensive skills laboratory time, is combined with clinical time in hospital acute and critical care environments, and specialty rotations, to provide the student with exposure to patients and skills needed for practice. Clinical sites are arranged by faculty to provide the best learning opportunity.
Graduates of the AG-ACNP program will be eligible to sit for Board Exams from the American Nurses Credentialing Center.
Program Learning Outcomes
- Evaluate outcomes of evidence based research and design appropriate interventions for specialized area of advanced nursing practice to improve the health of individuals, aggregates, and populations.
- Apply advanced concepts of leadership and advocacy to influence policy, health systems, and consumerism in order to effect population health service improvement.
- Integrate cultural sensitivity through an awareness of global health concerns to decrease health disparities.
- Initiate resolutions to ethical dilemmas arising from system of organizational conflict.
- Synthesizes nursing research and integration of best practice for change in professional practice based on scientific underpinnings for practice.
- Develop and evaluate new practice approaches based on nursing theory and theories borrowed from other disciplines.
- Demonstrate expertise in practice as an Adult-Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner.
- Design comprehensive care for patients from adolescent to end-of life with complex acute, critical and chronic illness, disability, and/or injury utilizing innovative, evidenced based methods.
The course load each semester is 5-12 credit hours. Students are considered full-time students throughout the program.
