Nurse practitioners (NPs) are interprofessional team members with specific qualifications and education. Emphasis on medical topics is necessary to educate competent NPs, yet this diminishes the nursing voice. Team Science (TS) is an interprofessional education (IPE) model that addresses complex clinical problems by integrating multidisciplinary perspectives. By leveraging broad expertise and a knowledge base, TS applied to advanced nursing education can effectively prepare students for the realities of team-based care and other collaborative environments, addressing a key priority and challenge in developing competency-based curricula aligned with society's health care needs.
The framework of competency-based education (CBE) provides an outcomes-based approach to the design and implementation of education programs, with competencies as evaluable abilities that integrate knowledge, skills, and values Health professions worldwide are shifting to CBE, yet a common interdisciplinary vocabulary remains aspirational. Aligning CBE terminology within an IDE curriculum can reduce misunderstandings about professional value, enhance communication, and provide a roadmap for the mutual development of an IDE-practice-competency taxonomy.
NP learners construct medical diagnoses and management plans applying context-driven synthesis to diagnostic reasoning (DR). Neither competency nor DR is a “one and done”; rather, CBE and DR compel the application of learning across diverse care environments and circumstances through the scaffolding of aggregate knowledge and experiences. Integration of DR into NP education relies on implicit learning through a preceptor-led component of the curriculum, with variable ability among individual clinicians. Details of competency mapping are necessary for academic nursing faculty in planning a CBE curriculum; clinical faculty responsible for precepted experiences may only require information necessary for observing and assessing competencies and for DR-based decision-making.
Medicine has endorsed Entrustable Professional Activity (EPA) as responsibility that trainees are entrusted to perform unsupervised following demonstration of specific competence. EPAs are observable and measurable in process and outcome providing the clinical context for competency; competencies are assessed in the context of an EPA-performance frame.
Nurse educator strategies applying a TS model to IPE, CBE, and curricular mapping with integration of EPA is presented, including multi-modality approaches to academic-practice partnerships and inter-university collaborations. Participatory Action Research concurrent to CBE implementation is outlined.
