Data collection
Data collection was conducted by an appointed auditor, an
experienced nurse practitioner from interstate and therefore
not a member of the Queensland nurse practitioner cohort.
The audit used a multimethods approach to data collection,
and data were used in combination to address each of the
questions as follows:
1 A postal survey was distributed to members of the MDT.
Consenting respondents completed and returned the
questionnaire directly to the research team. Questionnaires
were coded prior to distribution and linked to the
individual nurse practitioner’s service.
The Nurse Practitioner Stakeholder Questionnaire was
adapted, with permission from the copyright holder (Drennan
et al. 2009), and comprised three parts. Part 1 was a
series of 27 items on the evaluation of the nurse practitioner
role. Each item had five possible responses ranging
from 1 strongly disagree–5 strongly agree. Part 2 had two
items relating to the respondent’s professional group and
the degree to which they worked with the nurse practitioner.
A final section allowed for additional unstructured
comments to be added.
2 In-depth interviews were conducted with nurse practitioners
and patients. An interview guide was used for each
group to ensure that standard data were collected across
all services (see Table 1). The timeframe for each interview
was between 30–60 minutes.
3 Patient health record audits used a previously tested
data abstraction tool (Gardner et al. 2010) to collect
standardised data from the records of all participating
patients.
4 Peer case review of consenting patients was conducted for
each nurse practitioner drawing upon all data sources.
The peer case review template is given in Fig. 1. Management
of patients’ episodes of care was evaluated in accord
with criteria from Australian National Nurse Practitioner