Background: Advanced health assessment is a required course in advanced practice RN (APRN) education, essential to providing the foundation for differential diagnosis (DD) skills and the ability to formulate a plan of care.
Problem: Feedback from clinical preceptors revealed that our doctor of nursing practice (DNP) students struggled to make a DD.
Approach: This educational quality improvement project collected data from 7 cohorts of DNP students in either the Family Nurse Practitioner or Adult Gerontology Nurse Practitioner program to evaluate their readiness for clinical practicums and to inform necessary curriculum revisions.
Outcomes: Data revealed that students' ability to identify 3 DDs correctly during the summative health assessment objective structured clinical examination was inconsistent. Qualitative data revealed students lacked understanding on how to use results from the physical assessment to formulate a DD.
Conclusion: The findings of this project corroborate those from the literature that suggest we should teach APRN students DD skills explicitly.
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