The Palliative Care Nurse Practitioner program prepares the nurse practitioner to provide high quality palliative care for individuals facing serious, life threatening illness and their families/significant others. Palliative care is “both a philosophy of care and an organized, highly structured system for delivering care” to prevent and relieve suffering, and to provide the highest quality of life for patients with life-threatening or debilitating illness and their families (National Consensus Project, 2004, p. 2).

The courses are online and may be completed in 15 months. Students may visit campus during the initial course, or they may participate in a webbased seminar. Simultaneous clinical experiences during the third and fourth courses will provide some, or all of the clinical experience required to be eligible for taking the national credentialing exam as a Palliative Care Nurse Practitioner. This requires a master’s degree in nursing, a minimum of 9 hours in palliative care nursing courses and 500 hours clinical practice at the advanced practice level in palliative care nursing. Only 150 clinical hours are required in the palliative care nursing academic program and the other 350 may be obtained in an appropriate clinical experience. Requirements for clinical settings and preceptors are in The Candidate Handbook and Application url.

The Specialty in Palliative and End of Life Care is a scholarly option in which didactic courses may be taken alone by nursing and other graduate health science students. In this capacity, students who complete the 10 credit of didactic core courses and an elective three hour course related to palliative and end of life care will receive a document stating the student’s completion of the Specialty in Palliative and End of Life Care.