Collaboration with other healthcare professionals is vital to providing first-class patient care. Throughout the three years of the DNP program, students were given assignments that could only be completed by working with other students or by seeking assistance from members of the healthcare community. Group work can be difficult as it is easy to fall into the trap that the way you want to accomplish the mission is the best and only way. However, with each passing semester, I began to see the benefits that came from working on projects with other students. Everyone has his or her own strengths, and we began to learn over time what each student was best at. As our knowledge grew and we explored areas of medicine and nursing that appealed to each of us individually, we were able to come together to form cohesive groups and complete projects related to patient care at a high level of scholarship.

The first semester of the second year of the program revolved around the class Foundations of Independent Practice. This is when we were encouraged to really began thinking as Nurse Practitioners by completing case analyses of patients we might see in the clinical setting. The five cases I chose for this DNP essential were completed as group projects, and my group decided a different student would take the lead on each case. When not in the lead role, we made sure to never do the same part of a case, which allowed every person to contribute in a different manner each time. However, even though we each only contributed one part of every case to the final write-up, it required that we solve the entire case on our own and then come together to discuss our findings. I was impressed at how easy it might be to miss something important that was caught by a colleague. We worked quickly and efficiently together, and this type of group work really impressed on me that healthcare truly is a team effort.

The Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) presentation was the topic of my original Scholarly Inquiry Project. This project was completed during the last semester of the first year, and it was our first chance to dive into the literature and learn how to find relevant material to either support or refute a clinical question. The first challenge was creating a PICO(T) question to start us off on what was to be a two-and-a-half year project, so considerable time was spent reviewing literature to determine what might be best to study. From there, we had to split the project into smaller parts so we could divide and conquer, yet still come together weekly to analyze our findings. It was a grueling process in the beginning, but as we broke the parts down and shared ideas, the project picked up speed and the group threw themselves into completing our first presentation. Though this project would eventually be turned over to a different clinical site for another group of students to work on, it set the foundation for how the students would need to work together to complete our final DNP project. Looking back, I see that it takes this type of dedication and teamwork to solve real problems in the healthcare world, which is just one more reason I enjoyed spending the early years of my career with other scholarly-minded professionals providing world-class care to our nations’ heroes and their families, and look forward to doing the same in the civilian sector.