A Nurse Practitioner's View

Here is an article that refers to the NP led clinics that are flourishing in Canada. Canada established NP run clinics in 2007 and is continuing to add more as they are filling an important void in primary care. The article wonderfully points out that this initiative is collaborative an is not looking to supplant anyone else (for those worried about that). Great read. I'm hopeful that people are paying attention.

It looks like our Australian nurse practitioner colleagues endure similar baseless attacks on quality of care from the physicians they work with. See the article in The Australian entitled, "Bypassing GPs put lives at risk." "Things will be either missed, as in not detected, or there will be a misdiagnosis, as in something in error," Dr. Capolingua of the Australian Medical Association said." The easiest thing is always to play the quality card. Scare the public into thinking they will be misdiagnosed or will get inferior care by NPs, though nothing has proven that. Our Canadian friends subscribe to these tactics too. Right on queue, the Ontario Medical Association chimes in NP quality of care: "It's a delicate balance: Sure, we want to increase access to health care, but not if it dilutes quality of care. Nurses play a vital part in health care -as a team. You can't replace a doctor with a nurse." Nurse Practitioner scope of practice doe...