Jamk’s School of Health and Social Studies is a proud member of the Nordic-Baltic Advanced Practice Nursing Educators NORDPLUS network (Nordic / Baltic Advanced Practice Nursing Educators) established in 2019. It consists of educators who are teaching in master’s degree programs of Advanced Practice Nursing in universities and universities of applied sciences in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, and Åland. As a network, we strive to provide relevant and timely information about Advanced Practice Nursing education and role development as well as research, policy, and regulatory developments to all Advanced Practice Nursing teachers, healthcare employers, and relevant stakeholders. We also share best practices and success stories in master’s degree education to prepare our graduates with the essential competencies for career readiness in healthcare. Therefore, the network organized a five-day intensive course in Turku University of Applied Sciences in June 2023 aimed for Nordic/Baltic teachers who are currently teaching or are new teachers in an Advances Practice Nursing master’s program. The course was taught by educators (distinguished professors and principal lecturers) with long experience in Advanced Practice Nursing teaching.
We truly believe that teachers who educate future advanced practice nurses (APNs) are the driving force behind the training of skilled and competent APNs (Sulosaari et al. 2023; ICN GUIDELINES ON… 2020). In addition, it is important to have enough APNs with a master’s degree in Finland. That would be beneficial for the nursing profession as well as for the whole society. (Suutarla et al. 2023.) Competent educators are crucial since Jamk’s School of Health and Social Studies launched an English taught Advanced Practice Nursing master’s degree program in autumn 2023 – the first of its kind at the UAS level in Finland.
There is no doubt that transition to teaching APNs at master level education requires enhancement of existing educator competences, such as facilitation of learning, student assessment and evaluation, curriculum development, and quality improvement (Fitzgerald et al. 2020). These competences correspond well with the Nordic-Baltic APN educators’ intensive course where, for instance, learning evidence-based tools to perform clinical competency and educator’s role as an advocator and influencer in APN master’s education were taught. Teaching APNs also involves the support for their transition, and teachers can utilize transition theories in this process as taught in the course. Strategies such as preceptorship (Pleshkan & Hussey 2020), mentorship (Moss & Jackson 2019), and residency (MacKay et al. 2018) were also widely discussed as part of approaches towards supporting safe and successful APN students’ transitions to work as an expert on an advanced level of nursing.
In the course, Hopia was an educator and Grommi and Kamau were participants. Grommi and Kamau as participants of the course considered their participation an excellent opportunity to network with other APN teachers internationally. In addition, the course served them as a good orientation moving from teaching at bachelor to master level. This offered an opportunity to understand various aspects related to educating future APNs.
The intensive course consisted of the following themes:
- APN’s scope of practice nationally and globally with ongoing research
- Complex healthcare system – towards person-centered nursing care and services
- Patient reported outcome measures used in APNs’ work
- Advanced clinical methods and evidence-based tools to perform clinical competency of APNs
- Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) in APN master’s education
- Being an advocator and influencer in APN master’s education
Overall, the NORDIC-BALTIC teacher cooperation in the intensive course provided a comprehensive overview of the variety of education and health care systems as well as the different regulations of APNs in the Scandinavian and Baltic regions.