Overview
NURS 538: NP Clinical Practicum III is a part of the Master of Nursing: Nurse Practitioner (MN-NP) degree and the Post-Masters Diploma: Nurse Practitioner (PMD-NP) program.
In NURS 538, you will complete 200 hours of supervised clinical practicum to support attainment of the Entry-Level Competencies for Nurse Practitioners (College of Registered Nurses of Alberta [CRNA], 2023).
This is the third of four clinical practicums in the program, contributing to a total of 800 required clinical hours. You will have completed 400 clinical practicum hours prior to entering this course. Building on prior practicum experiences, you are expected to demonstrate increased consistency, efficiency, and independence in clinical performance, with growing proficiency in assessment, diagnostic reasoning, and management.
During this practicum, you will provide comprehensive primary health care to clients across the lifespan and in a variety of settings. You will continue to strengthen your clinical expertise and professional role identity as a nurse practitioner. Increased autonomy is expected, with a focus on refining clinical judgment, managing more complex presentations, and integrating care across settings and providers.
Emphasis is placed on direct client care and advancing clinical competence. You will complete focused and comprehensive assessments, apply differential diagnosis processes, select and implement appropriate interventions, including diagnostic tests, medications, and referrals, and document care in client health records. You are also expected to demonstrate leadership, professionalism, and effective collaboration with interprofessional team members to support optimal client and system outcomes
Outline
NURS 538 is a paced course delivered over 13 weeks using a blended learning approach that combines asynchronous online learning and regular synchronous virtual sessions. The course consists of the following components:
- Clinical practicum (200 hours)
In this course you will complete 200 hours of supervised clinical practicum with exposure to clients across the lifespan and in a variety of settings. Clinical faculty, who are licensed nurse practitioners, support evaluation of your clinical performance and role development and engage with you during clinical learning seminars.
Details regarding the clinical practicum experience are provided in the NP Clinical Practicum Guide available in your Brightspace course.
- Health promotion and program planning activity
Building on educational theories presented in previous courses, you will develop and critique a proposal for a health promotion or disease prevention initiative informed by population and system-level data.
- Clinical learning seminars
Synchronous clinical learning seminars will be held via Microsoft Teams.
Learning outcomes
Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:
- To identify client needs and inform diagnoses, analyze and synthesize information from multiple sources including:
- Health, pharmacologic and social history
- Review of systems
- Physical examination
- Laboratory and diagnostic tests
- Shared understanding of client’s biophysical, behavioural, cultural, ethnic, and spiritual circumstances, developmental life stage, gender expression, and social determinants of health;
- Integrate critical thinking and diagnostic reasoning to formulate diagnoses and to create a shared management plan;
- Perform invasive and non-invasive interventions according to standards of practice;
- Evaluate the effectiveness of the management plan and modify as necessary;
- Describe best practices for requesting and receiving consultations and referrals;
- Using data from environmental scans and health surveillance, design and evaluate a health promotion and disease prevention program.
Evaluation
The assessment structure for NURS 538 is based on the following course activities as indicated. Your final grade is based on overall performance across all required assessments. A variety of assessment approaches are used to evaluate achievement of the course learning outcomes.
| Activity | Weight |
| Participation activities | 20% |
| Assessments | 80% |
| Progressive clinical evaluation | Pass/Fail |
| Final clinical evaluation | Pass/Fail |
| Total | 100% |
Materials
Digital course materials
Links to learning materials will be made available in the course.
Textbooks and readings from other Nurse Practitioner courses will be used as appropriate.