Family Nurse Practitioner

The Family advanced practice nursing specialty prepares you to provide comprehensive wellness, acute, episodic, and chronic care to families and individuals across their life spans.

This track emphasizes diagnosing and managing common primary care problems through comprehensive physical and psychosocial assessment, decision-making / diagnostic reasoning processes, and health maintenance, including health promotion and disease prevention.

Focusing on a collaborative model for providing holistic care, the Family track prepares you for practice in a variety of hospital and community-based practice settings, including community health clinics, private medical practices, health maintenance organizations, specialty clinics, ambulatory care centers, school and home care facilities.

The course of study also stresses participation in and use of research development and implementation of health policy, leadership, education, case management, and consultation.

Core Competencies Developed

Knowledge and skills preparation include:

• Health promotion and disease prevention (epidemiology/risk analysis, genetics, risk reduction, health behavior guidelines, biological considerations, growth and development, screening tests, wellness assessment)
• Assessment of acute and chronic illness (epidemiology/disease risk and control, anatomy and pathophysiology, psychopathology, diagnostic reasoning including differential diagnoses, health assessment)
• Clinical management (standards of practice, clinical guidelines, pharmacotherapeutics, clinical therapeutics, clinical decision-making, patient safety, application of theoretical models, and documentation)
• Research (research process/utilization, continuous process improvement/outcomes evaluation)
• Practitioner-patient relationship (cultural and spiritual awareness, communication, teaching/coaching, patient advocacy)
• Professional issues (health care/public policy, ethical standards, scope of advanced practice nursing, access to care, coordination of services, scholarly activities)
• Research (research process, research utilization/evidence-based practice, continuous process improvement, outcomes evaluation, peer review)
• Administration/management (resource utilization—including human and financial, quality management, policy and program development, leadership, mentorship, and collaboration)

Certification for the Family Specialty

Upon completion of this course of study, graduates from the NP track are eligible to take the Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP-BC) certification exam given by the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), or the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners (AANP)