Educating advanced practice nurses for practice reality.

The complexity of the current health care environment ethically mandates advanced practice nursing (APN) educators to prepare graduates with a clear understanding of APN roles and professional and regulatory issues for them to make a reasonable transition to the marketplace. Integrating both clinical content needed for APN practice and APN role issues can be a difficult balance. This article describes critical role content needed in APN programs and offers a variety of teaching strategies. Recommendations regarding the timing and placement of role content in the graduate curriculum also are offered. Although there is no one right way to build APN role content into graduate coursework, some approaches are preferable to others.