There has been a significant increase in US Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) students coinciding with a serious shortage of nursing PhD-prepared and DNP-prepared faculty.1,2,3 Faculty are increasingly bearing the onus of high volume teaching and the likely lack of workload credit for DNP project participation.4 DNP program administrators are searching for innovative ways to maximize the use of DNP faculty, mitigate stress to retain existing faculty, and assure high standards for DNP student manuscripts. Through a unique process instituted by a predominantly online DNP program, a national pool of nursing DNP and PhD adjunct faculty audits manuscripts independently from the usual review by the chair and committee. Evaluations from students, manuscript reviewers, and faculty chairs regarding the success of this novel national process and suggestions for improvement are presented.
Methods:
Blinded surveys with open-ended questions were emailed to 334 DNP students, 40 external faculty reviewers, and 32 faculty chairs to capture satisfaction and effectiveness of the process with the electronic submission process as well as suggestions for streamlining or improving the process. Qualitative data from all three surveys provided valuable perspectives, quality indicators, as well as recommendations for improvement.
Results:
DNP students had a response rate of 57% of those who opened the email survey (n=219). There was a strong positive response regarding the success of the external faculty reviewer process in improving the DNP project and/or manuscript. Some students indicated frustration with discrepancies between reviewer expectations and comments.
External reviewers had a response rate of 91.7% of those who opened the email survey (n=24). Approximately half of the reviewers indicated that they had completed more than 11 reviews within the last 12 months. Some reviewers stated difficulty in providing quality, in-depth review due to the grammatical and/or structural errors in the manuscripts.
Faculty chairs had a response rate of 73% of those who opened the email (n=26). Faculty chairs felt the external reviewer process was valuable and effective. Faculty chairs commented that having multiple individuals reviewing manuscripts caused confusion for some students leading to conflicting information between the external reviewer and the faculty member.
Conclusion:
Data collected indicated that in general, the external reviewer process is successful. Suggestions for improvement included standardization of guidelines for external faculty reviewers, detailed manuscript outlines for students, and providing students with grammatical and organizational resources before paper review. These perspectives appear to be common to faculty reviewing DNP manuscripts in traditional programs.5,6