• Robert Shaw, David Vines, Jennifer Benavente, and Shane Keene.
• National Board for Respiratory Care, Overland Park, KS. Electronic address: robert.shaw@nbrc.org.
• Chest. 2024 Oct 3.

AbstractThere are physician shortages in the United States including the cardiopulmonary specialty. Nonphysician advanced practice providers, including nurse practitioners or physician assistants, have been proposed to meet some more routine patient care needs. A supplementary provider called an advanced practice respiratory therapist (APRT) has been proposed. Such personnel start as respiratory therapists followed by training in a graduate degree program. The Commission on Accreditation for Respiratory Care has published a set of standards for such an education program, and one program has begun to train APRTs. The Commission on Accreditation for Respiratory Care requires each accredited program to publish its outcomes. The respiratory therapy credentialing board, the National Board for Respiratory Care, has undertaken stewardship of assessing APRT education program outcomes. The research question asks whether there is national support to develop a standardized assessment of graduates' performances near the end of an APRT education program. This paper describes methods used during this study of the nascent APRT role, which informed decisions of an advisory committee as they considered what content to assess and how to design the measurement instrument. The study exposed a set of survey-derived metrics about potential content signaling whether there was endorsement among physicians, nonphysician advanced practice providers, and APRT graduates. Metrics are described from these and other subgroups plus the committee's decisions are explained about what content to assess and how. Most of the surveyed content was endorsed for being part of the APRT role; therefore, the committee proceeded to make design decisions about the outcome assessment.Copyright © 2024 American College of Chest Physicians. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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