The Nature of Scholarship, a Career Legacy Map and Advanced Practice

Professor Laserina O'Connor, PhD, MSc, BNS, RANP, RNP, RNT, RM, RN, is a registered advanced nurse practitioner (RANP) and registered nurse prescriber (RNP) in pain management and a professor of clinical nursing at University College Dublin (UCD) School of Nursing Midwifery and Health Systems, Dublin, Ireland.  She studied Advanced Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, and received her PhD from the European Institute Medical Health Sciences, University of Surrey, UK, and her master’s medical science degree and baccalaureate in nursing at University College Dublin. She is currently Director of the MSc Advanced Pain Management /Prescriptive Authority Program, Diploma Pain Management, a Professional Certificate in Pain Management, and a Diploma in Diabetes Care at University College Dublin.  Professor O'Connor is one of the co-directors representing nursing and midwifery at the UCD Centre for Translational Pain Research (CTPR). The UCD CTPR has strong multidisciplinary collaborative links with colleagues and other academic institutions in Ireland, England, Japan and the USA. She is Principal Investigator on a national funded project ‘An independent evaluation study to determine the impact of measuring nursing and midwifery-sensitive process metrics and indicators using Quality Care-Metrics’ across seven areas of practice: acute care, public health nursing, children’s, mental health, older person,  intellectual disability nursing and midwifery.  Professor O Connor is known for her work on pain and advanced practice nursing and has presented and published in the areas of pain, advanced practice nursing and other areas of clinical practice.

Chapter 1. The Nature of Scholarship.- Chapter 2. Boyer's Pillars of Scholarship.- Chapter 3. Transforming scholarly practice into clinical scholarship.- Chapter 4. The spectrum of clinical scholarship.- Chapter 5. Doctorate of Nursing Practice - Advanced practice in essence is a pyramid for clinical scholarship.- Chapter 6. The Science of Cartography.- Chapter 7. Reflections of a 'joint chair-advanced nurse practitioner' on finding meaning in a patient's story allied with clinical scholarship.