Pediatric Nurse Practitioner - Acute Care


The Pediatric Nurse Practitioner specialty in acute care prepares nurses for advanced nursing practice roles in caring for acutely, critically, and chronically ill children in a variety of health care settings.  Graduates will provide direct patient care management such as performing in-depth physical assessments, ordering and interpreting results of laboratory and diagnostic tests and ordering medications and performing therapeutic treatments.  Management of health and developmental needs of children and their families is also emphasized.

Caring for children can be the most rewarding and most troubling task in health care. There is nothing better than helping to cure a child’s cancer, and nothing worse than the certain knowledge that a child will not grow and develop into a healthy adult. These processes create challenges not just for the psychology of those involved, but also for the conduct of ethical practice. It may seem “natural” to want to “do everything” for sick kids, whether or not the proposed treatment is approved or has been well tested in others, and yet providers need to be prepared to think critically about the potential hazards involved in experimental treatment. In addition, knowing how to balance a family’s broader needs with the physical needs of the child is an important consideration that has ethical import. Rigorous training in bioethics will prepare the student to anticipate and address some of these challenges.

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