Doctoral Degrees in Nursing (RN)

00:01 Welcome to doctoral degrees in nursing.

00:04 The place where the acronyms are confusing and confusion runs the show.

00:08 Just kidding. Not really.

00:10 It's the truth. There are two primary doctoral degrees in nursing.

00:15 We have the DNP and the PhD.

00:18 The DNP or the Doctorate of Nursing Practice advances your practice of nursing in a clinical setting.

00:26 Examples of a degree focus with your DNP can be a nurse practitioner, a CRNA, a nurse midwife, an educator, and other things that are focused on actual practice in nursing.

00:39 The biggest thing to clarify here that gets confused all the time is just because NP is in DNP does not mean that you have...

00:47 If you have a DNP, that you are an NP.

00:50 Got it? See, you kind of see what I mean when I say that it's a bit of a mess.

00:54 A DNP is a doctoral degree, so you need to pick an area of focus. And while that area of focus can be as a nurse practitioner, it can also be in a ton of other clinical specialties as well.

01:06 Now let's take a look at the other direction with the PhD.

01:09 The PhD is focused largely on doing research and becoming an expert in a certain topic.

01:16 But the focus is not then to go out and actually practice with patients in an environment that uses the education every day.

01:22 The focus is to see how the information can then be integrated and maybe helping to integrate it. But you are not the clinician out there actually doing the implementation thing.

01:33 You are the mastermind behind all of it, coming up with the new things and seeing if they actually work.

01:39 And you understand the math and the statistics.

01:41 If you want to veer more into like the exploring the frontiers of nursing, this would be the path for you.

01:48 And once again, you would need to identify a specialty, since all graduate nursing degrees need a specialty attached to them so that they then have context. Hopefully that cleared things up a little bit.

02:01 I really would love to know who came up with the abbreviation in the doctoral Department of Nursing because it causes a whole lot of confusion.

02:10 But until I can fix it, and one day I will, here we are.