University of Notre Dame Australia
Master of Nursing (Executive Leadership)
- Delivery: Online
- Study Level: Postgraduate
- Duration: 18 months
Improve your strategic leadership skills as a registered nurse to excel in executive roles and shape the future of healthcare organisations.
Course overview
The Master of Nursing (Executive Leadership) program allows you to extend your leadership and management skills in various settings.
This program aims to enhance the knowledge and confidence of nurses to conduct independent studies. Students will learn the pragmatic considerations of systematic inquiry by adopting an experiential, inquiry-based approach to learning. The program will promote debate and discussion, enabling the student to become a competent consumer of evidence-based practice and contribute knowledge to the nursing discipline. Questions arising from the student’s nursing practice will address contemporary healthcare issues.
The focus of this online program will be to evaluate evidence in order to make informed judgements about the robustness and utility of the findings to nursing practice. The program will also provide an important link between research and nursing practice and will encourage the development of a culture of collaborative studies between practice and academia.
Key facts
What you will study
The Master of Nursing (Executive Leadership) program requires the completion of 300 units of credit, comprising the following courses:
Core courses (125 units of credit)
- Leadership Development Strategies in Health
- Patient Care, Quality and Best Practice
- Management
- Evidence-Based Practice
- Ethical Issues in Professional Life
Supervised dissertation (100 units of credit)
- Supervised Dissertation in Nursing
- Project Proposal Development
Elective courses (75 units of credit)
Select three courses from the following:
- Emotional Intelligence
- Clinical Governance
- Professional Role Development
- Business Analytics
- Negotiation Skills
- Organisations, Power, Leadership and Transformation
- Economics for Managers
- Strategic Workforce Issues
- Strategic Management and Planning
- Leading Change
Entry requirements
The program is open to you if you are a registered nurse who has a previous degree in nursing or equivalent and has a minimum of one year of relevant post-registration nursing experience.
Outcomes
Career outcomes
With a Master of Nursing (Executive Leadership), you can pursue careers as a nurse unit manager, nurse practitioner, nurse educator, forensic nurse, acute care nurse or clinical nurse.
Learning outcomes
Upon successful completion of the Master of Nursing (Executive Leadership), graduates will be able to:
- Analyse and interpret nursing scenarios to provide evidence-based quality practice.
- Use reflective practice techniques in a range of learning activities to promote professional practice.
- Apply leadership and collaborative skills within an interprofessional healthcare environment.
- Apply concepts of global, medico-legal, social and cultural diversity.
- Identify the distinguishing characteristics of nursing research in terms of purposes, underlying assumptions and available methodologies.
- Explore the principal paradigms employed in health and nursing research and differentiate between them in terms of their epistemological bases and their respective strengths and limitations in addressing different types of research.
- Formulate questions amenable to research and align those questions to appropriate research designs, data collection procedures, techniques and data analysis.
- Critique examples of research studies and models, identifying strengths and limitations of design that might threaten the internal validity and generalisability (external validity) of the findings.
- Identify the important ethical or other issues when conducting nursing research and apply value appropriate safeguards to the interests of all stake-holders involved a research project.
- Apply advanced technical skills and reflective practice within the domain of nursing research.
Fees and FEE-HELP
Indicative annual fee in 2025: $24,889 (domestic full-fee paying place)
The indicative annual fee is calculated based on a full-time study load of 200 units or eight courses.
A student’s annual fee may vary per:
- The number of courses studied.
- Choice of programs.
- Credit from previous study or work experience.
- Eligibility for government-funded loans.
Student fees shown are subject to change. Contact the university directly to confirm.
FEE-HELP loans are available to assist eligible full-fee-paying domestic students with the cost of a university course.