Advanced Practice Nursing

The respective executive directors of the registered nursing regulatory bodies in Canada requested the Canadian Nurses Association and Canada’s Testing Company, Assessment Strategies Inc., to facilitate the update and revision of the core entry-level competencies for nurse practitioner practice in Canada. Through a series of teleconferences, electronic communications, subgroup work and one face-to-face meeting, the Canadian Nurse Practitioner Core Competency Framework (2010) was completed.

This site is a compendium of tools used in APN related research.Along with the name and reference of the tool, we've listed:• Psychometric properties•Other APN studies that have used the tool •Author contact information•Where available, a PDF of the toolYou can browse the tools using the Main Menu on the left, or click here.When using instruments in your work, please acknowledge the authors by citing their original work and contact them for permission to use or modify where indicated. Please note: The development of the toolkit remains in progress. More instruments will be added as summaries are completed.

Nurse Practitioners (NPs)

In a review of studies comparing the primary care provided by NPs to primary care provided by physicians (MDs), researchers found that patients of both groups had comparable health outcomes. NPs were found to out perform MDs in measures of consultation time, patient follow-up, and patient satisfaction (Naylor and Kurtzman 2010).

Two recent international systematic reviews report no differences between patients treated by NPs and MDs in terms of health outcomes, type of care provided, or resources used. They also found patients seeing NPs were more satisfied and had longer consultations (Horrocks et al., 2002; Laurant et al., 2008).