ReentryBlues

I am a bit confused. I will be taking the AANP FNP boards in December and my Barkley audio review tapes say that there are NO photos, actual x-rays, or EKG strips on the exam. My friend just took the live Barkley review and she said they said that there ARE photos on the exam. Has anyone taken the AANP boards in 2015 and seen any questions with photos that one must identify (eg, identify this rash...)?

Juan de la Cruz, thank you. Sorry it took so long for me to respond, I had three other papers to write before this one! Now I'm finally getting around to it.

Our class has an assignment to write a patient specific standardized procedure, in this case, for the management of insomnia. (I live in one of those states, California, where NPs need standardized procedures...sigh.) However, the instructors WON'T GIVE US AN EXAMPLE yet insist that we do this assignment. I have searched and googled my heart out, but can't find a thing. Can anyone help me? Has anyone done this before or have an example so that I can figure out how to do this? Help?

Tsipareht, you pm'd me but allnurses won't allow me to reply because I don't have 15 posts. So I will answer here--sorry! Also, can't answer now, will do so in a day or two.

I am set to graduate from HNU in August 2015. I am in their FNP program. They do help you get clinical rotations, but only if you are in the SF bay area; otherwise, you are on your own. In the past, they had problems with placements, but now the class size has been trimmed down so that the placements available don't exceed the number of students. We will have about 25 in my graduating class (can't remember who is graduating, as one can enter in September or January). Six rotations of 104 clinical hours each are required for a total of 624 clinical hours. None of the classes are online. Instead, they are crunched into one four day weekend per month (more or less, sometimes it is 6 weeks), Th, Fr, Sat, and Sunday. You will write a lot of papers. A (very) few of the classes have one "hybrid" day, where you stay home and post responses to questions online--these are the non-clinical related classes. Many of the tests are online, and simulate the accrediting exams: 120 questions in 100 minutes, or similar, some with tricky or complex questions. You become very used to taking online tests, which will help when you take the boards. The physical assessment class was hard. At least one student was flunked out of the program because of her performance on the final, in which you had to do a complete physical exam on another student with everything but the kitchen sink thrown in. For gyn and male health, we performed our first pelvic, rectal, and prostate exams on human "reproductive health educators." You don't get any real ob practice until you do your clinicals, unless you count doing Leopold's maneuvers on stuffed abdomen models (I don't). Your capstone project is individual and must involve some sort of quantitative or qualitative research along with the proposal and paper that goes along with it. You actually have to do research and crunch some numbers (if quantitiative), albeit on a simpler level than what would be done in a DNP program. I am in the middle of mine now. The down side: The instructors are FNPs, and not experts in their subject. For instance, instead of a physiologist teaching pathophysiolgoy, we had an FNP; same with pharmacology. I think we would have gotten more out of an actual expert. Also, the weekends are looooong. Often you are there from 8 am until 8 pm. Heard stories about some students cheating and there were no repercussions. The program seems to be disorganized, but they have recently had changes in both the nursing department chair and the head of the FNP program. PM me if you want to know anything else.

Hi, tsipareht. I will be graduating from HNU's MSN/FNP program this August. I am happy to say that they have started to turn the school around. Students are welcome to find their own preceptors, but if they do not, the school will help them. I found most of my own throughout, but this final semester, I am depending on them to find one or two for me, and so far they have found one. There is another possibility in the works. HNU is still accredited with CCNE, and still approved by the California BRN, which visited the school last year and reviewed it. At this point, the school is not in any danger of losing accreditation. From the CCNE website: [TABLE=class: center, width: 95%, align: center] [TR] [/TR] [TR] [TD] [TABLE] [TR] [TD][/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD][h=3]Master's Accreditation[/h][/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Initial Accreditation Date: [/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD]April 12, 1999[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Most Recent Accreditation Date: [/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD]April 11, 2012[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Accreditation Term Expires: [/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD]December 31, 2017[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Last On-Site Evaluation: [/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD]April 2012[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] Next On-Site Evaluation: [/TD] [TD][/TD] [TD]Spring 2017[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] [/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] Since I haven't been to another FNP school, it is difficult for me to rate it against other schools. However, I just took a diagnostic readiness test that the school gives through Barkley and Associates and passed, and I still have one semester and two clinical rotations to finish before I graduate. I did not study for the test or take any review course prior to it, just my normal classes and studying. Sure, there are things I wish were better, but some of them I believe are endemic to NP education: not enough focus on the clinical, and too much emphasis on research and other fluff. Can't fault Holy Names for that; the fault is with our nursing leadership in the ivory towers endlessly gazing into their own navels. Anyway, hope this helps.