Date of Conferral

8-13-2026

Date of Award

August 2026

Degree

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP)

School

Nursing

Advisor

Andrea Jennings

Abstract

This Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) project was an educative project to improve staff knowledge of the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) in an outpatient behavioral health unit. The PHQ-9 is a nine-item depression screening scale to evaluate depressive symptoms presence and severity (Ford et al., 2020; Negeri et al., 2021; Stanyte et al., 2023). One identified practice issue was a knowledge gap in administration, scoring, and interpretation of PHQ-9 among nurses, which was noted by inconsistencies in the interpretation and use of the tool. Since nurses are essential in PHQ-9 administration and interpretation, systematic education was needed to enhance competency. There is evidence that staff education is a useful approach to strengthening the knowledge and skills of using clinical tools (Siniscalchi et al., 2020; Pfoh et al., 2020). Thus, the practice-oriented research question guiding this project was as follows: What is the impact of education on registered nurses’ PHQ-9 knowledge? The project involved 30 nurses whose PHQ-9 knowledge has been tested with the use of a pretest and posttest based on 10 questions. The pretest was to measure the baseline level of knowledge, whereas the posttest was to measure the knowledge acquired after the organized educational intervention on PHQ-9 administration, scoring, and interpretation. Findings revealed that the level of knowledge increased, with mean scores of 6.2 in the pretest to 9.1 in the posttest. This indicates the success of the educational intervention in improving the knowledge of nurses on the PHQ-9 tool. One positive social change that the project helped to make was a better understanding of evidence-based depression screening tool by nurses, which could assist in maintaining more reliable and efficient mental health screening practices (Siniscalchi et al., 2020).

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