A Nurse Practitioner's View

Wonderful job by Dr. Apold, Chairperson of the Board of Directors of the Nurse Practitioner Association, New York State ( The NPA ). Dr. Motta of the Massachusetts Medical Society also did a good job for making the case for fully utilizing NPs in the health care system and couldn't give any evidence-based reasons not to.

My attempts to start a healthy dialogue regarding NP practice and Dr. Bob's 4/1/08 diatribe have failed : "One nurse practitioner linked to yesterday’s post and attacked my formulation. At the risk of insulting her and her colleagues, I have worked with nurse practitioners and I believe that she and they overestimate their capabilities. The problem with mid-level providers comes from their lack of training in thinking about complexity. They do very well in routine care, but the big problems in medicine come from incomplete thinking about problems." Thanks for not insulting me. And oh by the way, I'm not a female. So much for a prime opportunity to discuss NP education and the like. So much for better understanding the working relationship between NPs and physicians. Oh well, I must return to counting tongue depressors now because that's about as complex as this clinician can get.

Welcome to my blog! I've pondered creating this for sometime now as I've searched the Web along with other blogs for current nurse practitioner-related content and have been unable to find much. This is my attempt to provide accurate and current information regarding Nurse Practitioner practice. My main goal is to start a healthy dialogue among nurse practitioners, other healthcare professionals and patients alike. There are a lot of misconceptions, inaccuracies and feelings about what nurse practitioners can/can't and should/shouldn't do. I've come across dozens of blog posts that are just plain wrong and hedge on bashing the profession. I hope to clarify some of these misconceptions in the hopes of providing the best barrier-free care possible to patients alongside other members of the healthcare team. For those of you unfamiliar with a Nurse Practitioner, lets start with a definition from the American College of Nurse Practitioners: "Nurse practitioners (NP...