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Core Competencies for Nurse Practitioners
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Core Competencies for Nurse Practitioners

Competencies demonstrate the knowledge, skills, and abilities that professionals must possess to
deliver the full extent of their roles and responsibilities. In the medical field, core competencies
are regarded as the highest standard of practitioners’ capability to perform their roles in any
clinical setting. Similarly, these standards are important because they guide the development and
delivery of competency-based educational curricula for trainee practitioners. Professional
organizations such as the National Organization of Nurse Practitioner Faculties (NONPF) and
the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) constitute working groups to create
core competencies for their discipline. In this regard, the purpose of this paper is to describe
NONPF's Core Competencies for nursing practitioners, how family nurse practitioners (FNP)
can utilize their roles to attain basic mastery of these competencies, and their demonstration of
the leadership, independent practice, and ethics competencies in practice.
Description of NONPF Core Competencies for NPs
The NONPF Core Competencies cover nine domains that demonstrate nurse practitioners’ ability
to deliver safe and quality evidence-based patient care services within their scope of practice.
These nine competency areas scientific foundations, ethics, policy, quality, leadership, health
delivery system, practice inquiry, independent practice, and technology and information literacy.
According to Chan et al. (2020), a combination of these core competencies reflects the
framework for NPs to provide compassionate and appropriate patient-centered treatment for
health conditions through effective information exchange and collaboration with patients and
other healthcare providers. Specifically, the four core competencies under the scientific
foundation area facilitate the integration of science and humanities knowledge into evidence-
based advanced nursing practices and utilization of research findings to improve processes and
health outcomes, while the three core ethics competencies promote the use of ethical principles
and considerations for ethical consequences when resolving complex patient, population, or
organizational issues (Thomas et al., 2017). Similarly, a combination of the seven core
leadership competencies with the five quality core competencies enables NPs to not only assume
senior leadership roles but utilize their position to promote collaboration within and outside their
practice settings and lead continuous quality improvement initiatives successfully (Thomas et al.,
2017). Hence, NPs who acquire these NONPF Core Competencies are effective leaders, change
agents and providers of safe, quality, and appropriate patient-centered services to individuals and
communities.
Furthermore, the remaining five NONPF Competency Areas are designed to make NP roles have
meaningful impacts on patients, populations, and health systems. First, the five core
competencies in the Technology and information literacy domain reflect NPs capacity to identify
and adopt the right healthcare technology solutions for their organizations, while the six core
practice inquiry competencies are focused on acquiring and utilizing the techniques and skills for
knowledge translation, clinical investigations, disseminating clinical evidence, and utilizing
clinical guidelines (Thomas et al., 2017). Second, the importance of healthcare policies to
population and individual health outcomes illustrates why the seven core policy competencies
assist NPs to advocate for laws, regulations, and standards that promote access, eliminate health
inequities, and make quality services affordable for all patient groups. Similarly, NPs need the
seven health delivery system competencies to improve the processes and systems for delivering
risk-free healthcare services through the application of their advanced knowledge of
organizational practices, structures, and resources in their roles (Thomas et al., 2017). Lastly, the
NONPF core competencies demonstrate NPs' capacity to fulfill the requirements of licensed
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independent practitioners, including professional accountability, diagnosis management,

provision of patient-centered care, culturally-appropriate caregiver education, and care
coordination.
Mastery of NONPF Core Competencies
Meanwhile, the family nurse practitioner’s (FNP) role in providing patient care through
diagnosis, treatment planning, disease prevention and management, and health promotion
activities across the lifespan provides opportunities to achieve mastery of these core
competencies. According to Schlunegger et al. (2021), FNPs’ crucial role in providing primary
and specialized care to every member of the family gives them the use opportunity to develop
advanced leadership, technology, and information literacy, policy advocacy, scientific
knowledge, practice inquiry to promote quality and ethical care. As independent practitioners,
FNPs can use their disease and illness diagnostic duties and implement care plans to integrate
theories and research evidence into practice and recommend practice changes that inform quality
improvement projects. Similarly, their active involvement in patients' transition across the
continuum of care is an excellent opportunity to master the advanced leadership, practice
inquiry, and policy competencies for eliminating the cost and access barriers that are created by
policies and healthcare delivery systems (Honig, Doyle-Lindrud, & Dohrn, 2019). Therefore, the
consulting functions, medication prescription, interdisciplinary functions, and treatment plan
responsibilities of FNPs are appropriate platforms for mastering several elements of the NONPF
core competencies.
Demonstration of Three Competencies
Additionally, the demonstration of leadership, independent practice, and ethics competencies is
another approach to illustrate the methods for developing mastery of the nine NONPF core
competencies. A family nurse practitioner can demonstrate ethics competencies through the
application of the ethical principles of patient autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and
justice during physical assessments, information exchange with families and other healthcare
professionals, and prescription of medications. For example, obtaining patients' informed consent
on the family member who can read their laboratory results or contribute to the treatment
decision are some of the ways FNP can demonstrate ethical competency. Regarding the
demonstration of leadership competencies, an FNP can utilize their advanced critical thinking to
make an appropriate diagnosis from a list of complaints, communicate effectively with patients,
utilize all relevant clinical and non-clinical resources efficiently, and take ownership of the
diagnostic, treatment, and follow-up care of their patients. Finally, FNPs are licensed
independent practitioners who can demonstrate their ability to deliver unsupervised quality, safe,
and effective healthcare services through thorough patient education, interpretation of normal
and abnormal findings from laboratory examinations, and recognition of the cultural influences
on patients’ decisions on their care and importance of professional collaborations and care
coordination to good health outcomes.
Conclusion
In summary, the NONPF core competencies are standardized frameworks to guide the
professional development of nurse practitioners in their respective clinical specialties. While the
knowledge, skills, and techniques to develop these competencies are several, their interrelations
and various opportunities to utilize multiple ones during the patient simplify the processes for
their acquisition. As an FNP, patient diagnosis, treatment planning, medication prescription, and
ordering of laboratory tests consist of various activities and decision-making points that lead to
the development of these competencies. In this regard, prospective family nurse practitioners and
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other advanced practice registered nurses need to be sensitive to these opportunities to leverage
them for their professional development. Finally, the attainment and mastery of these
competencies is a continuous process that requires consistency, dedication, continuous learning,
and accountability on the part of novice nurse practitioners.
References
Chan, T. E., Lockhart, J. S., Schreiber, J. B., & Kronk, R. (2020). Determining nurse practitioner
core competencies using a Delphi approach. Journal of the American Association of
Nurse Practitioners, 32(3), 200-217. DOI# 10.1097/JXX.0000000000000384
Honig, J., Doyle-Lindrud, S., & Dohrn, J. (2019). Moving towards universal health coverage:
Advanced practice nurse competencies. Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem, 27.
https://doi.org/10.1590/1518-8345.2901.3132
Schlunegger, M. C., Aeschlimann, S., Palm, R., & Zumstein-Shaha, M. (2021). Competencies
and scope of practice of nurse practitioners in primary health care: a scoping review
protocol. JBI evidence synthesis, 19(4), 899-905. DOI: 10.11124/JBIES-20-00554
Thomas, A., Crabtree, M. K., Delaney, K., Dumas, M. A., Kleinpell, R., Marfell, J., & Wolf, A.
(2017). Nurse practitioner core competencies content. The National Organization of
Nurse Practitioner Faculties, 1-16.
https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.nonpf.org/resource/resmgr/competencies/20170516_NPCor
eCompsContentF.pdf

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Core Competencies for Nurse Practitioners

Core Competencies for Nurse Practitioners

independent practitioners, including professional accountability, diagnosis management,

core competencies using a Delphi approach. Journal of the American Association of

Nurse Practitioners, 32(3), 200-217. DOI# 10.1097/JXX.0000000000000384

Advanced practice nurse competencies. Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem, 27.

protocol. JBI evidence synthesis, 19(4), 899-905. DOI: 10.11124/JBIES-20-00554

(2017). Nurse practitioner core competencies content. The National Organization of

Nurse Practitioner Faculties, 1-16.

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