400 ■ III: ROLE FUNCTIONS OF DOCTORAL ADVANCED NURSING PRACTICE
accuracy, productivity, efficiency, and safety). Thus, a cadre of professionals who can partic-
ipate in and lead team science (integrated multidisciplinary research teams), develop health
homes, and integrate best current evidence with clinical expertise and patient/ family pref-
erences and values are to be created for the effective delivery of health care (Stevens, 2013).
For effective health care team performance, nurses must come to the table with a clear pro-
fessional identity and comprehensive leadership training and development.
To collaborate and mentor students effectively, nursing faculty must relinquish
insular behaviors. Health care providers of the 21st century must function effectively
within nursing and interprofessional teams, fostering open communication, mutual
respect, and shared decision making to achieve a quality patient care. DNP programs
must prepare the workforce for a complex health care environment, designing system-
wide fixes. The siloed natures of professional schools and graduate programs with
competing interests are barriers to collaboration. Joint curricular design replete with the
opportunity for cross- walking core and cognate courses are essential. Interprofessional
courses include genomics, systems, human factors influencing patient safety and qual-
ity, EBP, informatics, health economics, including value- based health care delivery
(Elton & O’Riordan, 2016; Porter & Teisberg, 2006 ), health policy, and public- health/
population- health principles and telehealth (Novak et al., 2016). Coordination and col-
laboration with other health care disciplines are difficult to achieve due to physical
location, competing priorities, simple geography, profession program accreditation
constraints, and asynchronous academic program calendars. Telehealth opportunities
remove many barriers to interprofessional practice (IPP) and IPE.
Since the majority of educational and health care institutions were built before
1970, redesign of these facilities should promote opportunities for interdisciplinary
collaboration, IPE, and student success. Interprofessional simulation centers and true
interprofessional clinical settings in universities and health care agencies provide an
opportunity for DNP practice inquiry projects related to patient safety and quality, sim-
ulation and device design, competency development, outcomes management, continu-
ous learning, and systems improvement.
Nurses must think more broadly about potential collaborators in solving the prob-
lems of the health care delivery system. Disciplines such as industrial, biomedical, and
mechanical engineering have much to offer as engineering principles are applied to DNP
curricular development and hospital and clinic development, design, renovation, and
sustainability. Nurse- led models emulate the triple aim to enhance the patient experi-
ence, improve quality, and reduce cost. The DNP was developed to reengineer health
care (Novak, 2006) to achieve these goals through designing accessible, effective, effi-
cient, safe, and high- quality health care delivery systems. The DNP addresses the com-
plexity of the health care system head- on, including the information, knowledge, and
technology explosion; spiraling costs; and the need for a systems approach to create new
models of care and solve existing health care dilemmas (Wall, Novak, & Wilkerson, 2005).
The DNP student brings core capabilities of leadership development, health promot-
ion, disease prevention, case management, patient safety and quality, and care of the indi-
vidual, family, community, as well as a biopsychosocial, behavioral perspective, within a
social justice and population systems context. The DNP graduate must understand resource
utilization, and possess a strong service orientation. Engineering students bring expertise in
root cause analysis, systems design, device design, simulation, and human factors. Melding
these entities yields a dynamic, synergistic, and innovative environment, where each part-
ner brings affiliations and skills to improve care that is evidence- based. This creates a hor-
izontally and vertically integrated interprofessional learning environment where not only
the students benefit, but also the nursing do, and other health science and engineering fac-
ulty learn and create new educational and practice models (Rapala & Novak, 2007).