Adult-Gerontology Nurse Practitioner

The Adult-Gerontology Nurse Practitioner program prepares nurses for advanced practice through a course of study focused on the care of patients from age 13 and their families.  Students choose an area of clinical emphasis from a wide variety of subspecialty areas.  Courses focus on advanced health assessment, advanced pathophysiology, advanced pharmacology, and management of episodic and chronically ill adults.  Courses also focus on the elderly client in various stages of aging.  These courses are combined with specialty seminars and clinical experiences that emphasize the physiological and psychosocial impact of illness on the patient and family.  Graduates prepare for the Adult-Gerontology Primary Care Nurse Practitioner exam. 

While bioethics is relevant to the overall care for patients throughout the lifespan, it is particularly important for the care of geriatric patients. Given the aging population, it is expected that healthcare resources will be stretched significantly as a result of the increased demands on the system. The experience of considering resource limitations in advance – in particular, thinking about how to distribute scarce resources such as provider time, equipment, and facilities – will enable Emory graduates to be at the forefront of not just excellence in practice, but also of creating sustainable policy that will ensure the fair distribution of goods and services to the aging population.