What is a DNP Scholarly Project?

What is a DNP scholarly project?

The scholarly project is what separates a Doctor of Nursing Practice from a master’s-prepared nurse practitioner, and at Creighton, it also sets the DNP apart from a traditional research doctorate. Researchers generate evidence. DNP graduates implement it. “When our students go out, they’re job-ready to start approaching clinical problems quickly,” says Meghan Potthoff, PhD, APRN-NP, a professor and the Keough Family Endowed Chair in the College of Nursing. “Here’s a problem. I know how to solve this; I know how to implement a rapid-cycle change — and I know how to evaluate it.”

Students identify a gap between what the evidence shows and what is actually happening in their clinical setting, then design, implement and evaluate real change. Not a proposal. Not a simulation. A change that goes live, with real patients and real results to show for it.

The project is integrated into the final four semesters of the program through a sequence of scholarly seminars: identifying the clinical problem and reviewing the literature, developing methods and engaging stakeholders, implementing the change and collecting 8 to 12 weeks of data. The final semester focuses on presenting and disseminating findings. Most students invest roughly 30 to 40 hours per semester in this work alongside their regular coursework.

That structure keeps the project manageable. “It was broken down into chunks,” says Michelle Horst, DNP’25, a neonatal nurse practitioner at CHI Health Creighton University Medical Center – Bergan Mercy. “There were moments of higher anxiety, but it was never sustained.”

Amanda Hinkel, BS’07, BSN’10, DNP’14, director of advanced practice at Children’s Nebraska and a Creighton graduate, knows the feeling well. “I would lie if I said it isn’t overwhelming to think about,” she says. “Once you’re in it, it just really becomes your passion.”

Identifying a clinical challenge worth solving

For Falcone, the problem found her.

She was working as a bedside nurse on the inpatient hematology-oncology floor at Children’s Nebraska when she enrolled in Creighton’s DNP program. She had always felt drawn to patients with sickle cell disease, a painful, chronic condition that disproportionately affects African American and Hispanic patients and is often misunderstood and underserved.

In the emergency department, the gaps were hard to miss. When sickle cell patients arrived in vaso-occlusive pain crisis, the response was inconsistent. No standardized pathway existed. Pain wasn’t reassessed at regular intervals. Because sickle cell pain can’t be seen on an X-ray or confirmed on a physical exam, these patients sometimes faced skepticism born of insufficient knowledge of how the disease actually presents.

“A lot of these patients have had pain crises before, so they know how to manage their pain,” Falcone says. “If you don't know about sickle cell, when someone comes in and says, ‘I need this opioid, this is how we need to do this,’ that can be a red flag. We were hoping to eliminate the stigma and the second-guessing of what needs to be done for this patient.”

The nursing staff was feeling the strain of an imperfect system. Under a standard emergency department workflow, a nurse assesses a patient’s pain, contacts a provider for an order and then retrieves the medication. For sickle cell patients in vaso-occlusive crisis, the sequence often took longer than the clinical benchmark for administering pain medication, which is 30 minutes. The gap between what the standard called for and what the process could deliver was consistent, measurable and fixable.

Falcone brought the idea to Hinkel, who recognized both the need and the fit. “It really seemed like the perfect project,” Hinkel says. “Feasible and tangible within the timeframe, with significant positive impact for our team and our patients.”

Together, they developed a standardized algorithm that allows nurses to initiate specific pain medications based on a patient’s pain score, with physician authorization built in from the start. No more waiting for a call-and-response cycle while a patient sits in pain. Nurses who have long wanted to move faster for this population now have a clear, sanctioned path to do exactly that.

Faculty mentors invested in your success

What followed was more than a year of complex, deeply collaborative work. This is where many prospective DNP students discover what the scholarly project requires of them. The student leads, but they are not alone.

Each Creighton student is paired with two partners: a DNP Scholarly Project Chair on the academic side and a Practice Scholarly Project Mentor at the implementation site. Together with the student, that team forms the core of the project, and their job is to support the work through the complications that inevitably arise when trying to change how a clinical system operates.

Falcone had Potthoff and Hinkel. There were many complicated moments, a timeline that kept slipping and the sheer weight of being the point person between two institutions. The clearest moment came near the end. With the pathway nearly finalized, the committee proposed adding ketamine, an IV pain medication used for in-patients, to the emergency department protocol. Finalizing that addition meant programming infusion pumps, educating nursing staff and obtaining additional approvals — all before Falcone’s graduation deadline. “I think I called Meghan and Amanda many times, thinking my world was ending,” she says.

What she found on the other end of those calls was perspective.

“In my mind, it was a cliff, and we were falling off of it,” Falcone says. “But in their mind, they already saw the path around it. They knew the detours were coming, and they knew how we were going to navigate them.”

Potthoff brings all three parties to the table early and deliberately, ensuring the Practice Mentor has vetted the project as realistic before the student goes too far down any particular road. “We want to make sure that what the student is planning, they can articulate to their Practice Mentor in front of me,” she says, “so I can see them nod and say, yes, this is realistic.”

The clinical side benefits, too. Hinkel notes that institutions such as Children’s have found real value in hosting Creighton DNP projects. Students bring fresh perspectives and dedicated energy to problems that busy clinical teams haven’t had the bandwidth to fully address. “There are always things we can be doing better,” she says. “Our students bring new eyes and the skills to do something about what they see.”

And somewhere in the middle of all that work, something shifts. “At some point you realize you have spent so much time reviewing the literature, developing this, thinking about this and really owning and leading this project,” Hinkel says, “that you are one of the experts in the room. You do have a lot to say and contribute.”

Turning evidence into measurable results

The pathway went live. Data arrived monthly. Within the first month, Falcone could see it was working.

Pain was reassessed more frequently and controlled more effectively. The time from arrival to first pain medication administration decreased. Admissions for vaso-occlusive crisis decreased. Time in the emergency department fell. A balancing metric she had watched carefully, patients discharged and returning to the ED within 48 hours because pain wasn’t fully controlled, showed zero occurrences. And the emergency room team now had a standardized protocol where there had been none.

“That first month, I was like, OK, this is actually making a difference,” she says. The pathway received hospital-wide approval and was integrated into Children’s Nebraska’s clinical systems. A similar protocol was extended to the inpatient side. Quickly, what had started as one student's DNP project became a better overall experience from the emergency room door through discharge.

Falcone was selected as one of just two students to present her work at the 35th Annual Sigma Theta Tau Scholars’ Day at Creighton, the program’s scholarly showcase hosted by its honor society. She later presented a poster at the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners conference in Colorado. At graduation, she received the Constance Smith-Peterson Memorial Award for Most Outstanding DNP Project and Outstanding Graduate Student. She had no idea it was coming.

“I think I cried,” she says. “I think I may have blacked out for a second. But knowing the impact that it had on patients, and having people recognize that impact, was the most important part.”

Today, the pathway team is already discussing what comes next. Acute chest syndrome, the second-most-common presentation among sickle cell patients and a respiratory complication, is the focus of a new pathway taking shape at Children’s Nebraska. The work Falcone started continues to grow. “Making something that can continue to live on with you or without you,” she says, “is so important.”

Different DNP projects, shared purpose

The pattern holds across Creighton’s DNP program. Every year, graduates across specialties take on real clinical problems and produce real change.

Horst spent 12 years as a NICU nurse before returning to Creighton for her DNP. Her project addressed inconsistent pain management during procedures in neonates, including lab draws, intubations and PICC placements. She worked across nursing and provider teams to make pain reduction a consistent priority and leaned heavily on her education to help her colleagues understand not only what the protocols required but also why neonatal pain management matters for long-term development.

“I’m someone who needs to know the why behind something,” she says. “Focusing on the why really helps achieve the outcomes and lays a foundation people can use throughout the rest of their careers.”

Her advice to incoming students: where possible, pursue a project the clinical team has already identified as a need. She found that provider investment comes more naturally when the problem has been validated by the people who will be responsible for sustaining the solution after graduation.

Erin Rasmussen, BSN’17, DNP’25, came to her project through a detour. Her original idea was displaced by a competing quality improvement initiative already underway, so she regrouped, consulted with a neonatologist at CHI Health Bergan Mercy and landed on a CPAP protocol for preterm infants. It wasn’t the project she had planned. It turned out to be exactly the project that was needed.

Preterm babies were being taken off continuous positive airway pressure too early, leading to respiratory setbacks, prolonged oxygen exposure and longer hospital stays. Rasmussen’s evidence-based proposal: keep all infants on CPAP until at least 32 weeks’ gestational age, with clear weaning criteria and a return to CPAP rather than supplemental oxygen if additional respiratory support is needed. “There was evidence this practice was working in more NICUs around the United States and around the world,” she says. “I had a good grasp on it. I thought it would work here.”

It did. By the end of her project, oxygen exposure among the infants she tracked had fallen by 50%. The unit made the protocol permanent. Rasmussen is now a neonatal nurse practitioner at Children’s Nebraska and is already planning her next quality improvement initiative, drawing directly on what she learned the first time. “I can base what I’m doing now on my old project,” she says. “It’s really helpful.”

Building leadership beyond the classroom

What Falcone, Horst and Rasmussen demonstrate, each in their own way and through their own solutions, is that the DNP scholarly project is not an academic exercise to be checked off on the way to a degree. It is practice for the career ahead.

The skills it builds are the hardest to teach from a lectern: navigating institutional systems, building stakeholder consensus, designing change that survives contact with a real clinical environment and standing behind findings in front of the people the work was meant to help.

“For many of our graduates,” Potthoff says, “the changes they’ve made continue to grow and evolve even after they’re done. Sometimes they serve as a foundation for other students who take it and expand it further.”

For Falcone, it also turned out to be the thing that brought her full circle. When she interviewed for the hematology nurse practitioner position at Children’s Nebraska, her scholarly project was everywhere.

“I think it definitely showcased her passion and her work ethic,” Hinkel says. “Getting to work alongside so many of those same team members, they saw her in that light.”

"I talked about it in every single interview I did," Falcone says.

She got the job. The pathway is still running. And every quarter, she sits down with the committee to review data, refine what they built together and think about what comes next.

That’s not a capstone. That’s a career.