Nurse Anesthesia (MS)

The curriculum of the nurse anesthesia program is divided into four components: core nursing courses, core clinical courses, nurse anesthesia specialty didactic courses, and nurse anesthesia specialty clinical courses. You will take the core nursing courses together with nursing graduate students in all six of the Bouvé nursing concentrations. 

It takes thirty-two months of full-time study to garner the fifty-four semester hour credits required for the master of science degree in nursing, with the nurse anesthesia specialization. Students graduate in May each year and are eligible to sit for the national certification examination for nurse anesthetists, administered by the Council on Certification of Nurse Anesthetists.

This learning environment allows all students to gain an appreciation of each of the specialties’ contributions to advanced nursing knowledge and practice. The nurse anesthesia program includes:

• 4 core nursing courses
• 3 core nursing clinical courses
• 7 nurse anesthesia specialty didactic courses
• 6 nurse anesthesia specialty clinical courses
• 1 elective

In line with Northeastern’s emphasis on practice-oriented education, you will begin clinical work in your first year. Didactic and clinical experiences are integrated throughout the thirty-two month program. During the practicum and throughout your clinical education, you will develop skills in appropriate anesthesia care planning, management, and evaluation for a variety of surgical patient populations.

You will have access to all anesthetic techniques, including invasive monitoring and regional anesthesia (i.e., administering spinals and epidurals), and you will develop and maintain keen critical thinking and reasoning skills in regard to patient care. You will be assigned progressively more complex patients, including neonates, infants and children, obstetrical services, and adults with complex co-existing conditions. This range of experience opens up your career options in a field where all qualified graduates obtain employment almost immediately.

You will practice on the most sophisticated anesthesia equipment, including SimMan, and you will be responsible for administering and managing all regional techniques and modalities of invasive monitoring under the guidance of expert CRNAs and physician faculty.

Rather than moving from placement to placement to study different specialties, you will stay primarily at the same clinical site throughout your program. You will become incorporated into the health care team at your placement site.

You will begin your clinical work after the first eight months of the program and integrate those experiences with classroom and laboratory education throughout. Our clinical affiliates are large urban academic teaching centers, including:

• Tufts Medical Center
• Rhode Island Hospital
• Emerson Hospital
• UMass Medical Center
• Catholic Medical Center
• Women and Infants of Rhode Island

These placement sites have been selected because of the quality of their care and because they are large enough to give you access to all clinical specialty areas, including:

• cardiothoracic
• genitourinary
• gynecologic
• head and neck
• neurosurgical
• obstetrics
• orthopedics
• outpatient procedures
• pediatrics & neonatal
• plastics
• transplantation surgery
• trauma

Your preceptors include certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) and board certified anesthesiologists. Many of the CRNAs and anesthesiologists are actively engaged in clinical research and some hold doctoral degrees in their fields. All of our clinical faculty have many years of both clinical and preceptor experience.

Program Director: Maria vanPelt, PhD, CRNA