O'Rourke Institute for Advancing Professional Practice

About Us

The O’Rourke Institute for Advancing Professional Practice (OIAPP) was established in 1995 with a small group of iconic thought leaders in nursing with Dr O’Rourke as the driving force. Through OIAPP, professional role clarity and support for a professional practice approach to care was propelled to counter the business- led introduction of a task-based practice model that undermined professional practice and the professional role of the RN. Dr O’Rourke is renowned for her pioneering, seminal work on role clarity. Her work defining nursing as a professional practice discipline impacted the legislative arena where she was instrumental in rewriting the California Nursing Practice Act in 1974.

Dr. O’Rourke has published and presented extensively at regional and national venues. Over the past four decades, her body of work in the field that includes her Professional Role Identity Formation Theory, and Model of the Professional Role™ has culminated in the creation of Role-Driven Practice™ (RDP), a theoretically grounded professional practice model. Implemented in hospitals nationwide, RDP™ acts as a foundation for improving performance and practice outcomes, accelerating the development of professional role competence and accountability, ensuring interprofessional leadership, establishing role driven therapeutic and collegial communication patterns within the interdisciplinary healthcare team, and for ensuring appropriate role relationships among professional, technical, and assistive roles.