The Importance of NPs in Managing Hypertensive Patients

The NP’s role in managing hypertensive patients is critical and comprehensive, covering all aspects of patient care, including detection and follow-up; diagnostics and medication management; patient education, counseling, and skill building; and coordination of care.

NPs thus play an integral part in helping to circumvent hypertension-associated morbidity—linked to diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, obesity, and dyslipidemia—and mortality, with 10.8 million deaths reported globally.  A review of the latest clinical evidence unveiled three fundamental approaches that are key to managing hypertension and reducing the risk for cardiovascular morbidity and all-cause mortality: lifestyle modifications, single-pill combination therapy, and therapy that takes into account patients’ comorbidities. 

To effectively fulfill their responsibilities, NP students must have a solid understanding of antihypertensive drugs, which requires more in-depth knowledge than that of registered nurses (RNs). What can programs and educators do to ensure students can achieve and retain that level of mastery?

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How Picmonic elevates mastery of the 3P’s and sharpens clinical decision-making

Enter Picmonic, a leading audio-visual mnemonic learning platform that breaks down complex concepts into easy-to-remember videos that empower students to build mastery across various drug classes—and many more essential NP topics. Students can continuously strengthen knowledge building toward sound knowledge application and sharpen clinical judgment and decision-making. Ultimately, this leads to enhanced patient outcomes.

Educators can start solidifying students’ foundation early in the curriculum by augmenting the 3P’s with Picmonic—mapped to popular textbooks and resources—and continue utilizing the solution throughout the program. This activates board prep within the curriculum, providing a time-efficient solution for NP students who are often stretched between meeting the demands of an advanced practice curriculum and working as an RN. Furthermore, Picmonic’s spaced repetition learning algorithms allow students to embed essential concepts deeper into long-term memory and also strengthen future recall. 

One way to integrate Picmonic into the classroom is by creating a playlist, pulled from the platform’s 1,800+ video lessons, and assigning it to students before lectures along with the related textbook chapters—or resources such as the review on hypertension management mentioned above—to facilitate a group discussion during lectures.

TrueLearn’s FNP SmartBank: Bridging Theory to Practice

Educators can take it one step further and utilize TrueLearn’s quizzing features to assess students’ clinical decision-making skills. For example, after discussing the review, they can select relevant board-style questions from TrueLearn’s FNP SmartBank and distribute them as student assignments or incorporate them into lectures for continued discussion.

This way, students tap into the powerful Picmonic-TrueLearn learning loop—the two platforms are integrated— whereby they first learn via Picmonic, assess on TrueLearn, and then revisit Picmonic for questions they miss. Repeating this back-and-forth process across the questions bridges theory to practice, helping to refresh and reinforce key concepts to strengthen mastery and elevate students’ clinical decision-making skills.

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