The Advanced Practice Provider (APP) Leadership Certificate course offered through the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC guides current professionals on their leadership journey. By giving them the tools and helping them develop the skills they need to be effective leaders in their workplace, the course sets the stage for them to advance health care management, quality patient care and efficient workflows.
Laura Abels graduated from the Spring 2022 APP course and is the Advanced Practice Education Coordinator at Akron Children's Hospital in Akron, Ohio. Below, she shares her perspective on the APP course and what she gained from her experience at Pitt.
Q: How is the APP Course helping you achieve your workplace goals?
A: “My responsibilities include onboarding and orientation for all our new advanced practice providers, as well as continuing education and professional development for our existing advanced practice providers. We have over 450 APPs in my workplace.”
“I started advising and overseeing some of our advanced practice committees, participating in business planning and position description development. These are part of the professional and workforce development, which does not come naturally to me, but the course gave clear steps on how to do or approach a lot of these areas.”
Q: Why did you choose UPMC/Pitt’s APP Leadership course over other programs?
A: “I first became aware of the course because I was working on a professional development pathway, like an orientation pathway, for our new APP division and department-specific APP leaders who oversee the APPs in their groups. When those APPs are stepping into their new roles, they're usually going from an entirely 100% clinical role into this hybrid, where they're mostly still clinical, but then they have to carve out this leadership aspect.”
“I was developing curriculum for that, and I found Amy Haller's (course co-director) contact information. I reached out to her. I said, ‘What can you tell me?’ and she said, ‘Actually, we have a whole course!’ I couldn’t have been more excited to learn more. I told Amy that I wanted to do the course so that if we can recommend it for our APPs, then we would!”
Q: What have you found most valuable from the course?
A: “The cool thing about the program is that it is so specifically tailored for APPs who are in a similar role to mine, and that is so incredibly unique -- it's like gold.”
“One of the valuable things I took away from the course and modules was the content on ‘The 5 C's of Effective Communication.’ We also read Brené Brown's "Dare to Lead" and one of the things that Brown says is ‘Clear is Kind;’ that the best thing we can do for our leaders and the best thing we can do as leaders is to be really clear with our employees, colleagues and coworkers.”
Q: Would you recommend this course to a colleague?
A: “The course has everything very intentionally outlined to say, ‘This is the best way that you can learn how to communicate with your folks.’ And then I can model that and teach it to them so that they can use it with and among others.”
“I am very excited now to be able to recommend it to our new APP leads because I think it is exactly what they need to start. Content and concepts from some of my presentations or programming led me to tell my mentees that if you like this type of content, you should consider this full APP course at Pitt.”
Interested in the APP course? Classes are in the fall and spring and fill up quickly.
To learn more, contact Deborah Farkas at farkasdr@pitt.edu, or register now.
See responses from Kori Morgan, another APP leadership course participant.
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Updated December 4, 2023