About Pediatric Nursing Academy

The Pediatric Nursing Academy is a global initiative dedicated to strengthening the pediatric nursing workforce through competency-based education and internationally relevant micro-credentials. Developed in collaboration with global subject matter experts, healthcare leaders, and professional organizations, the Academy provides nurses with validated opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge, advance their careers, and improve the quality of care delivered to children and families.

Our foundational pediatric nursing micro-credential is designed to assess applied knowledge, skills, and clinical judgment aligned with global standards for pediatric care. Through accessible, stackable learning and credentialing pathways, the Pediatric Nursing Academy supports workforce development, promotes professional mobility, and helps ensure children worldwide receive safe, high-quality care.

The Academy works in partnership with health systems, ministries of health, academic institutions, and nursing leaders to create scalable, sustainable solutions that address global pediatric workforce needs.

Preparing and Empowering Global Nurses to Deliver the Highest-quality Pediatric Health Care

The National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners (NAPNAP) is recognized as the global leader, trusted authority, and indispensable resource for comprehensive pediatric advanced practice nursing. Guided by a vision in which all infants, children, adolescents, and young adults receive equitable, high-quality pediatric health care, NAPNAP’s mission is to optimize health outcomes and empower a global community of pediatric nursing experts through education, leadership, and advocacy.

In 2025, NAPNAP partnered with TruMerit (formerly CGFNS International, Inc.), a non-profit organization recognized as a leading authority in credential evaluation for healthcare professionals. Since 1977, TruMerit has served more than 4 million healthcare professionals across 212 countries, advancing the global healthcare workforce through programs that verify and promote knowledge-based practice competencies.

Through this partnership, NAPNAP and TruMerit aim to expand access to high-quality, culturally responsive pediatric education and credentialing worldwide, strengthen pediatric workforce capacity in regions with critical shortages, and establish a sustainable global framework for pediatric nursing competency recognition. Together, the organizations seek to elevate standards of pediatric care delivery and support nurses in delivering safe, evidence-based care across diverse health systems and settings. 

Current Challenges Exposing Children’s Welfare to Significant Risks

The global health workforce is experiencing profound strain due to chronic underinvestment in training pipelines, misalignment between education and practice requirements, and wide variation in professional standards and credentialing systems across countries. These structural barriers limit health professionals’ ability to practice at the full scope of their competencies and restrict workforce mobility, particularly in regions facing persistent shortages. Pediatric care is especially affected, as providers with specialized pediatric training remain in critically short supply worldwide. In many settings, pediatric services are delivered by generalist providers without formal pediatric preparation, contributing to gaps in quality, continuity, and age-appropriate care. The State of the World’s Nursing 2025 report underscores that such inequities in education, competency development, and role recognition pose a direct threat to progress toward universal health coverage and the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly for maternal, neonatal, child, and adolescent health. Without coordinated approaches to education, credentialing, and competency recognition, these workforce challenges risk producing long-term, generational consequences for child and adolescent health outcomes.

The outcomes we aim to achieve include:

1. Lifting future generations up across the world by expanding pediatric-focused health education to improve access to high-quality pediatric health care, regardless of world region or income level;
2. Applying global pediatric micro-certification/credentialing standards to recognize pediatric health workers’ competence – attesting to what they know and what they can do for infants, children, and adolescents;
3. Advocating for role-recognition to support credential portability across geopolitical borders and disciplinary boundaries;
4. Fostering inclusive, evidence-based research to drive global certification/credentialing concepts and product development to meet pediatric health care workforce needs;
5. Reimagining pathways for the global health workforce to support care model evolution;
6. Addressing the current gap between global nurse training and pediatric specialty education; and
7. Addressing the challenges in accessing health care due to provider shortages, and other determinants of health (conflict, transportation, and others).

Proposed Action Plan:

To level the playing field for all nurses worldwide, an exam-based global pediatric micro-credential approach, measuring applied knowledge, skills, and behaviors to validate pediatric nursing competence against a set of global standards centered on patient safety, serves a useful purpose as a portable credential of role-recognition and work-readiness on an international scale. Equipped with this global credential, nurses will have more mobility within the profession, across employment opportunities, authorities, and geopolitical boundaries throughout their career.

NAPNAP will provide the necessary education on the fundamentals of pediatric health care, and TruMerit will ensure the necessary psychometric integrity and usability of the micro-credential.  This foundational pediatric micro-credential will also serve as the building block for future stackable modules, badges, and advanced pediatric micro-credentials, supporting long-term program growth and workforce development.

Mission Statement: 

Coming Soon!

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