The section on advanced practice nursing In the World Health Organization’s recently released State of the World’s Nursing 2025 Report was informed in part by research conducted by Associate Professor Kelley Kilpatrick. Prof. Kilpatrick holds the Susan E. French Chair in Nursing Research and Innovative Practice at the Ingram School of Nursing, and is a researcher at the Centre de recherche de l'Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont, part of the CIUSSS de l'Est-de-l'Île-de-Montréal.
The report notes that globally there is a trend to optimize the contributions of nurses in advanced nursing roles. In the summer of 2024, Prof. Kilpatrick and her team published a study titled “A global perspective of advanced practice nursing research: A review of systematic reviews”. The team included international researchers as well as doctoral students I. Savard, L.A. Audet, G. Costanzo, and undergraduate student M. Khan.
Representing the most comprehensive and exhaustive assessment of advanced nursing practice to date, this study found highly consistent evidence that care provided by advanced practice nurses (APNs), nurse practitioners (NPs), and clinical nurse specialists (CNSs) was equal or superior to usual care for 29 indicator categories across a wide range of clinical settings, patient populations and severity of illness.
This study supported the first of the WHO report’s emerging priorities for 2026-2030 – to further develop APN roles as a means of increasing access to high quality health care.