Advanced Practice Public Health Nursing (APHN) in the U.S.: Roles and Education

Abstract

In early 2023, Association of Community Health Nursing Educators (ACHNE) convened a task force of public health nursing education thought leaders from the United States (US) to revise their position paper on the state of graduate public health nursing education. [Correction added on May 16, 2025. after first online publication: In the preceding sentence, the legal name of the organization (ACHNE) has been corrected in this version.] At the time the task force began their work, the COVID-19 pandemic was still producing new variants, but the world had largely moved on without prevention restrictions, little to no tracking on the nightly news, and schools and universities going back to business as usual. Public health nurses (PHNs) served heroic roles in the face of the pandemic overall. However, public health nursing practice remained somewhat in the shadows of the spotlight on acute care clinicians combating the virus, even as some PHN leaders faced the end of their careers in their roles as enforcers of pandemic restrictions. In addition, although advanced practice nursing roles in the United States have proliferated in the past 20 years, they have been almost exclusively focused on care of individuals, despite evidence of the need to broaden the scope of healthcare to include a population focus. Advanced practice roles at the population and systems levels are much less understood and have a smaller footprint in the current healthcare system. The convening of this Task Force served as a "timeout" to reflect on the roles of PHN leaders in the months after pandemic emergency orders were finished and to articulate the future of graduate education in nursing at the population level, both its value added to the health of the public and how this value can be maximized. The result was the ACHNE white paper, Advanced Practice Public Health Nursing: Roles and Education, presented here.

Keywords: advanced practice nursing; graduate nursing education; public health nursing education.