Background and Purpose:Nurse practitioners (NPs) are expected tofill gaps in providing primary care in the UnitedStates and need vital skills to meet the growing need for primary care providers. One necessary skill is managing“on-call”clinical questions/concerns by patients across the life span. To date, there are no published studies thataddress“on-call”simulations for family NP (FNP) students across the life span.

Methods:This quasi-experimental, mixed-methods design used a confidence scale and Krippendorff’s method forcontent analysis of discussion pages to determine the effectiveness and confidence of simulated“on-call”scenariosfor FNP students during each of their clinical courses.

Conclusions:There was a significant increase in the confidence level of students as measured by the confidencequestionnaire (t= 3.07 [33];p< .001), at the end of the FNP didactic and clinical courses. Krippendorff content analysisrevealed three themes: self-reliance; thinking on your feet; and uncertainty of management.

Implications for Practice:“On-call”processing is a skill that is needed in graduate FNP programs so that theseproviders are fully prepared to meet any challenge they may encounter.