484 ■ III: ROLE FUNCTIONS OF DOCTORAL ADVANCED NURSING PRACTICE
more to better serve society’s needs for caring and healing. Working together to
build bridges and solutions to the big health problems that threaten all people is an
important shared goal. Together, through nursing doctoral education, we have great
opportunities to create important think tanks where innovative solutions may be
born.
If you are a clinician embarking on this DNP journey, which requires a tremendous
investment in time, money, and professional energy, there are important questions to
ponder. As a profession and for each individual contemplating their degree— the impact
of the DNP degree on the individual professional nurse and the larger health care con-
text is quite relevant. We now enter the second decade of having this practice- based
nursing doctorate academic degree. DNP graduates have entered the nursing market
place— both in the academic and practice settings to fill positions that are meeting work-
place needs (Auerbach et al., 2015).
■ MUST YOUR ROLE BE DEFINED AT THIS TIME?
WHAT IS YOUR VISION?
Reading this chapter for a clear vision of how either your role will be shaped differently,
or how, as an educator, you can facilitate shaping the role of your DNP students differ-
ently from MSN students may be problematic. By now, you may be wondering if the
preceding paragraph has created “double talk” with no clear vision. You are probably
right. If you think you will find a clear role description that separately delineates APRN
roles based on the MSN and DNP degrees, pause right now... because... the vision is
being shaped now by all of us. We are the next generation of what Dunphy, Youngkin,
and Smith (2004) coined as the “rebels, renegades, and trailblazers” (p. 25) of nursing’s
future. The rebels, renegades, and trailblazers of yesteryear shaped the current myriad
of APRN roles as we know them today. Yet, as you read in previous chapters of this
book, formalization of the APRN role into the construct as we now know it took mul-
tiple decades. Remember, Loretta Ford, EdD, RN, PNP, FAAN, the pioneer of the NP
movement, met tremendous resistance from the discipline of nursing as she forged for-
ward with her visionary model of nursing practice with the NP role (Ford, 1997; Ford &
Gardenier, 2015). (See earlier chapters to learn more about the history of the APRN role
as we know it today. Carefully consider the barriers that those bold and brave nurses
confronted. Are there parallels today?)
Shaping the future role possibilities of a nursing workforce with practice doctor-
ates occurring today and in years to come rests with all of us. Not only is this a time of
creativity, but a time for critical evaluation of why one is considering the DNP degree
and not the traditional PhD. Deep, honest reflection of this basic question should yield
great insights to guide a myriad of possibilities that should enhance the nursing profes-
sion’s tripartite contributions (practice, research, and education) for the greater good of
society.
History has shown us that the boundaries of practice are pliable and flexible
enough to change with time and context to meet the needs of all stakeholders (Aiken
& Fagin, 1992; Fairman, 2008, 2010; Stanley, 2005). Passage into this millennium with
the nursing practice doctorate presents new opportunities for the profession of nurs-
ing to empower those most passionate about nursing, who have the perseverance to
pursue and accomplish a terminal degree in the discipline of nursing. The practice doc-
torate must differ from the traditional PhD to take the nurse on a trajectory beyond the
“research walls” of academia in which the PhD is expected to advance nursing science