About 180 nurse practitioners and physician assistants from around the country gathered at Loews Nashville Hotel Sept. 4-5 for the 13th annual ACNP/PA Critical Care Boot Camp.
The event, organized by the Vanderbilt University Medical Center Office of Advanced Practice, is a conference for critical care nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) to receive specialized critical care training to improve patient care.
The lecture-based course is designed to educate new providers with relevant evidence-based clinical information and challenge experienced providers with new research, updated best practice guidelines and thought-provoking discussions. The diverse conference faculty includes NPs, PAs, pharmacists and physicians, all who are leaders in their disciplines both at Vanderbilt and in health care facilities nationwide.
This year’s topics included “Advanced Ventilator Management,” “Heart Failure in the ICU,” and “Evaluation and Management of Encephalopathy.”
“The program itself is designed specifically for APPs (advanced practice providers) in critical care, for which we have seen a consistent demand for over 13 years,” said Sarah Bloom, DNP, APRN, AGACNP-BC, assistant in Medicine and a member of the committee that organized this year’s Boot Camp. “We try to put together a program that covers topics that are very timely and that there are meaningful updates in, and the quality of our presenters at Boot Camp is top-notch.”
New for this year, learners had more interactive opportunities, including participation in moderator-led roundtable discussions on topics such as APP postgraduate education, ICU staffing models for staff well-being and APP billing in the ICU. Q&A sessions were added during lunch, and participants can now use interactive polling software as a part of discussions, Bloom said.
“We really wanted a Boot Camp to be more interactive for APPs,” Bloom said. “We just find it creates a better opportunity for learning when people are more interactive and able to engage with the content.”
In addition to sessions, the two-day conference offered a complimentary networking event, ultrasound skills lab, cadaver lab and a hands-on procedural skill lab with mannequins.
Participants, including recent graduates and early-career professionals as well as experienced advanced practice providers, come from all over the country, and their feedback helps inspire topics. They also have networking opportunities and leave with a new group of friends and mentors.
VUMC is a national leader in advanced practice. The Boot Camp is one of the only conferences in the country that provides focused education for critical care NPs and PAs. There are more than 325,000 NPs and 150,000 PAs in the United States today, and more than 1,600 advanced practice providers are at Vanderbilt. These clinicians are educated in nationally accredited programs, clinically trained and board certified in their area of practice.
Each year, the conference honors the late Arthur Wheeler, MD, who was medical director of the Medical Intensive Care Unit and helped launch and support the event.
A planning committee works most of the year to develop the conference.
“The committee has done an excellent job of keeping our Boot Camp topics up to date, so that we are able to help APPs throughout the tenure of their practice,” said Buffy Krauser-Lupear, DNP, CRNA, APRN, MMHC, senior director of Advanced Practice.