As you establish your goals and objectives for this course, you are committing to an organized plan that will frame your practicum experience in a clinical setting, including planned activities, assessment, and achievement of defined outcomes. In particular, your plan must address the categories of clinical reasoning, quality in your clinical specialty, and interpersonal collaborative practice.

For this Assignment, you will consider the areas you aim to focus on to gain practical experience as an advanced practice nurse. Then, you will develop a Practicum Experience Plan (PEP) containing the objectives you will fulfill in order to achieve your aims. In this practicum experience, when developing your goals and objectives, be sure to keep PMHNP clinical skills in mind.

To Prepare

• Review your Clinical Skills Self-Assessment Form you submitted last week, and think about areas for which you would like to gain application-level experience and/or continued growth as an advanced practice nurse. How can your experiences in the practicum help you achieve these aims? There may be overlap between your skills goals and your PEP goals.
• Review the information related to developing objectives provided in this week’s Learning Resources. Your practicum learning objectives that you want to achieve during your practicum experience must be: 
  • Specific  
  • Measurable  
  • Attainable  
  • Results-focused  
  • Time-bound 
  • Reflective of the higher-order domains of Bloom’s taxonomy (i.e., application level and above)  
• Discuss your professional aims and your proposed practicum objectives with your Preceptor to ascertain if the necessary resources are available at your practicum site.
• Select one nursing theory and one counseling theory to best guide your clinical practice. Explain why you selected these theories. Support your approach with evidence-based literature.
• Create a timeline of practicum activities that demonstrates how you plan to meet these goals and objectives based on your practicum requirements.

The Assignment

Record the required information in each area of the Practicum Experience Plan template, including three to four (3–4) measurable practicum Learning Objectives you will use to facilitate your learning during the practicum experience.