Nursing: Concentration in Family Nurse Practitioner

The School of Nursing provides master's level educational opportunities for registered nurses with a bachelor's degree in nursing who wish to enter the profession or pursue an advanced practice nursing degree.  Through advanced education and clinical training with this emphasis, students are prepared for both California NP license and national board certification (American Academy of Nurse Practitioners & American Nurses Credentialing Center). Nurse Practitioners (NPs) are licensed to practice autonomously and in collaboration with other health care professionals to assess, diagnose, treat, and manage the health needs of patients of all ages. NPs can also serve as health care researchers, interdisciplinary consultants, and patient advocates.

Registered nurses with bachelor's degrees in nursing can enter the master's program by demonstrating they have met nursing content comparable to that in the SF State baccalaureate program.

Registered nurses who already hold nursing master's degrees may apply to the post master's family nurse practitioner (FNP) certificate program (graduate level coursework). Please note that students taking post master's FNP certificate courses will enroll for courses through the College of Professional & Global Education.

The master's level curriculum includes both core courses and specialty courses. The core courses, the portion of the program for all students, include nursing theory, advanced practice nursing roles, pathophysiology, research, leadership, health policy, and ethics for advanced practice nurses. Units taken in addition to the core program are selected with graduate nursing faculty advisement. 

Students completing the Master's program will achieve the School of Nursing's MSN Expected Student Learning Outcomes as outlined below:

• Applies and integrates broad organizational, client-centered, and culturally appropriate concepts in the planning, delivery, management, and evaluation of evidence-based clinical prevention and population care and services.
• Demonstrates nursing and inter-professional collaboration that facilitates open communication, mutual respect, and shared decision-making to achieve quality patient care.
• Creates collaborative programs and educational approaches that address health promotion and disease prevention needs of culturally-ethnically diverse individuals and populations.
• Demonstrates a professional leadership role to promote quality and safe clinical patient care that incorporates ethical and critical decision-making approaches, fiscal accountability, effective working relationships, and systems perspectives.
• Assimilates nursing knowledge and expertise through research utilization, informatics literacy, and generates educational, leadership, or clinical approaches to advance professional nursing practice.
• Utilizes information technology to communicate effectively, manage knowledge, mitigate error, and to support decision-making.
• Designs evaluation strategies for nursing care outcomes to assess, manage, and determine resource allocation for evaluation of nursing care outcomes.
• Evaluate methods, tools, performance measures, and standards related to quality improvement within a healthcare organization.
• Applies research outcomes within the practice setting to resolve identified practice problems.
• Organizes interventions at the health care system level utilizing policy development processes, economic principles, and employing advocacy strategies to influence health and health care services for individuals.