Interest in nurse practitioner residencies grows but funding lags

Residencies help get doctors better prepared to practice medicine and now the same idea is being applied to nurse practitioners. But residency programs that can offer nurse practitioners more clinical experience are few and funding for them is uncertain.

The further training, however, translates to greater job satisifaction for nurse practitioners. An April survey of 254 nurse practitioners revealed that 70 percent of those who completed residencies were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their jobs--that’s compared to slightly more than half of nurse practitioners without post-graduate experience.

Still, there are only 38 nurse practitioner residencies across the country--and only three have received federal funding, according to a recent Medpage article. (Two of the programs that received federal funding are no longer in existence.)

A pioneer in the development of nurse practitioner residencies, Margaret Flinter, APRN, Ph.D., senior vice president and clinical director of Middletown, Connecticut’s Community Health Center, is passionate about the ability of such programs to set up freshly-minted nurse practitioners for success.

"The amount of clinical experience and training that one has in [the first year of practice] ... is insufficient for people to enter practice particularly in the very challenging environment of the role of primary care provider and the setting of community health centers,” Flinter told Medpage.

Also at issue is what these programs are called. Flinter’s program is a “residency,” whereas other leaders refer to their programs as “fellowships.”

One sticking point seems to be the voluntary nature of these programs. For example, Britney Broyhill, DNP, ACNP-BC, director of the nurse practitioner program at Carolinas Healthcare in Charlotte, North Carolina, uses the term “fellowship.” Another reason to support Broyhill’s use of this term is her program gives new clinicians real-world exposure after receiving their degree, in addition to subspecialty training, she told Medpage.