Christa Braun-Inglis, DNP, APRN, FNP-BC, AOCNP, University of Hawaii Cancer Center, Honolulu, Hawaii, assesses the effect of implementing an academic-community partnership between the University of Hawaii Cancer Center and the University of Hawaii Nancy Atmospera-Walch School of Nursing on doctor of nursing (DNP) students interested in oncology. 

Assigning DNP students into this Oncology Paired Preceptor Program provides students with valuable clinical opportunities and can potentially assess workforce challenges that smaller communities face. 

Braun-Inglis presented these findings at the 2024 JADPRO Live Meeting in Grapevine, Texas. 

Transcript: 

Hello, my name is Christa Braun-Inglis, I'm a nurse practitioner and associate researcher at the University of Hawaii Cancer Center and a nurse practitioner practicing breast clinical oncology at Hawaii Pacific Health. I'm here today to talk about our JADPRO Live 2024 poster “Oncology Paired Preceptor Program to Support Nurse Practitioner Transition to Practice in Hawaii.”

Over the past 10 years, we've seen a huge growth in the amount of oncology advanced practice providers and in Hawaii we are facing a significant shortage of oncology clinicians. I've practiced almost my whole career in Hawaii and I recognize the need to really help to grow our own in terms of nurse practitioners and physicians' assistants here in Hawaii because we have unique challenges in Hawaii when people come here or they relocate here, as well in terms of cost of living, geographic isolation so we really were looking to how we can help improve our oncology workforce and partner with the nurse practitioner school at the University of Hawaii to help improve our workforce and really to close that gap that new NPs feel when they're entering into the field of oncology. From 2021 to 2023 we partnered with the University of Hawaii School of Nursing DNP program to coordinate a clinical rotation for interested students that really focused on oncology. We used the 2018 ONS nurse practitioner competencies as a guide, we did scale them down a bit but we really wanted to utilize these competencies to really get the student to know what is the expectation when you're out there in practice in medical oncology, and these competencies help to guide the preceptor, but also help to guide the student. We had a total of 8 students go through this program from 2021 to 2023 and 50% of them are now practicing in our community, in oncology and doing very well. We also surveyed the preceptors and the students who went through this program and they gave feedback and what we found is that students wanted some more didactic lectures in the first part from 2021 to 2023. We did have lectures recorded that were available to them, but we didn't have any routine lectures. Also what came out of the evaluations was to maybe expand the program to 2 semesters if we could fit it within their population focused nurse education, and the third thing that came out was to implement a clinical research component because we're really proponents of advanced practice providers being involved in clinical research here in Hawaii. 

We just launched our new program this year, we've got 3 students going, we've expanded it to 2 semesters, the first being an introduction to oncology and then second semester being a more immersive oncology and pulling in that clinical research component. And again, we're just hoping to really help to pair the students that are really interested in oncology, having a really meaningful experience for their clinical rotations, and then hopefully helping to place them in oncology positions after they graduate. 

The reason this is so important in a community setting in Hawaii is we don't have any of these large academic centers that have these fellowships for oncology APPs so we really have to figure out how can we really get these nurse practitioners up and going in our community, and otherwise there's a huge turnover rate, retention issues. Nurse practitioners aren't happy, they leave the field so we're really trying to figure out how we can help to really bridge this transition and we feel we've been really successful so far with our initial program and now expanding it to the 2 semesters I think is going to be really successful as well.I would encourage others that may face these same challenges to look at partnering with nurse practitioner schools, physician assistant schools, and trying to really identify those students that are interested in oncology and then really giving them a meaningful clinical rotation. Another thing we did too this year is we added a 4 hour DNP student symposium at the beginning of the semester to give them some more didactic and really get them to understand what different oncology APP roles are out there in our community as well.

Source: 

Braun-Inglis C, Workman T, Acoba J, et al. Oncology paired preceptor program to support nurse practitioner transition to practice in Hawaii. Presented at the 2024 Journal of the Advanced Practitioner in Oncology Meeting. November 14-17, 2024; Grapevine, Texas. Abstract JL1235C