I think you brought up a great topic, which is a concern for a lot of DNP students, and we worry about it from time to time. The great thing about DNP projects is that it offers so much variety, so it depends on a few things like where you work? Such as acute care, outpatient clinic, or school nursing. It also depends on the specialty. If it is psychiatric, you can focus on mental health, such as looking into if the place you work at has a suicidal scale for admitted patients. Family nurse practitioners, you can focus on chronic health issues like diabetes, hypertension, CHF, and how you can improve the life of your particular focused population. If you work in acute care, work with your leadership, join the professional governance team and look for things you would like to change or improve like staff satisfaction, nurse burnout, or patient wait times.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by Mansi Patel.

The DNP project is one of the highlights of this program and is very crucial in defining the specifics and future standards of the educational requirements and formulating more research opportunities in the field. One of the things that are crucial in the DNP project consists of a focused specialty. One of the specialties I think that will be highly beneficial to you and interesting is one of the specialties you would like to practice in the future. For example, if one of the specialties you are interested in focuses and concentrates on the heart, you can then choose healthcare changes that concern the heart. Furthermore, it is highly important to focus on a certain population such as infants, children, or adults. This population focus will make the DNP project to be more specific and more testable. Along with these factors, it is highly imperative to incorporate a plan and an evaluation of the process and the results.

I feel like this is such a great topic to put on this forum. At the beginning of the DNP programs, the DNP project is one of the first things discussed with the curriculum. I appreciate the timing of the introduction of the DNP project, so it gives students the time to start, as well as keep on thinking of ideas for their DNP project throughout the program. The DNP project is essentially a quality improvement project, which allows the DNP student to look at problems within the healthcare setting, conduct research, and create a plan to improve processes that need changes. My DNP project ideas have ranged from improving nursing turnover rates secondary to burnout in the Emergency Department and nursing interventions to improve outcomes with critical trauma patients. I am early on in my program, so I am still thinking of ideas and inspiration, but I am happy to have a start.

Hi Njideka,
Thanks for bringing up the topic of DNP project ideas. I am also learning from reading the responses to your post. I am coming to the end of my first year in my DNP program and I still do not have a solid idea of what I want to do for my DNP project. It feels like such a vast project, and it feels overwhelming to start thinking about it. I’d recommend talking to other DNP students who are further along their studies and to nurses in your specialty about the issues they have noticed at work. You can also look up published works of other DNP graduates and see if the topics of their projects interest you.

I feel like this is a great topic to post on this website, and it could be a great place for students to voice their ideas. What kind of experience have you had with patients? Are there any practice problems that have stood out to you?

I have been a nurse for over ten years, and I have worked -with many different types of patients, but I have come to specialize in cardiac and patients on dialysis. When I was working in the ER, speaking with discharged patients, I often came across MANY patients with new onset CHF symptoms that went undiagnosed because they were not sick enough to admit. Giving a new diagnosis of CHF requires long-term care and follow-up. Often, I would see patients coming in fluid-overloaded, given a one-time dose of Lasix, and then discharged – putting a band-aid on the issue but not providing the patients or families with any education. I thought I would do my DNP project on something cardiac-related, possibly just providing ED staff with more educational resources to give borderline new undiagnosed CHF patients, but since I am no longer working in the ED, my focus has shifted.

Since I am now working with ESRD patients in an acute care setting, I want to focus more on that, but I am unsure what my focus will be. Many hospital staff do not know much about dialysis patients, how to care for them properly, or what to do or not do when a patient has hemodialysis, medications to give or hold, etc. It is hard to choose a topic that is simple enough that we can finish it by graduation. Choosing too complex an idea may make the DNP project unattainable. Hope this helps!