ROLE OF NURSE PRACTITIONEER IN FAMILY MEDICINE

Role of nurse practitioneer in family medicine

Role of nurse practitioneer in family medicine

Introduction

A Nurse Practitioner (NP) is a registered nurse who has completed specific advanced nursing education (generally a master's degree) and training in the diagnosis and management of common as well as a few complex medical conditions. Nurse Practitioners are generally licensed through nursing boards rather than medical boards as they provide advanced nursing services. Nurse Practitioners provide a broad range of health care services. Nurse Practitioners treat both physical and mental conditions through comprehensive history taking, physical exams, physical therapy, ordering tests and therapies for patients, within their scope of practice. NPs can serve as a patient's "point of entry" health care provider, and see patients of all ages depending on their designated scope of practice. The NP role originated as one strategy to increase access to primary care 9 in response to a shortage of primary care physicians. The first successful program to prepare NPs was developed at the University of Colorado in 1965 under the co-direction of a nurse, Loretta Ford, and a physician, Henry Silver to prepare pediatric NPs with a focus on health and wellness. Working collaboratively with physicians, NPs with this advanced education from non-degree, certificate programs, were able to identify symptoms and to diagnose and manage health problems in children. (Johnson BS, 2008)

Evidence can be determined in a number of ways including expert opinion panels based on clinical observation, on blending of expert opinion with empirical evidence in consensus reviews, and increasingly, on multiple studies (i.e., meta-analyses) of published scientific evidence. For this latter standard, before a treatment can be called evidence-based, a series of steps takes place in the research domain using the scientific method.

To plan and prepare for a research study, researchers first scour published scientific literature, typically in peer-reviewed journals, to find out what already is known from previous research. They may set out to replicate, disprove, or elaborate on past findings. Or, they may aim to investigate a more novel approach. From there, researchers create hypotheses about how certain treatments (i.e., independent variables) may impact or relate to target outcomes (i.e., dependent variables). Researchers carefully specify the independent and dependent variables, data collection procedures, and plans for statistical analyses.

Explanation

Although more practitioners are using evidence-based treatments and funding sources often require doing so, various barriers to their implementation slows the process of adoption for the field as a whole. One barrier is the perceived lack of definitive knowledge about what constitutes evidence-based treatment. The reality is that many clinicians in the field are consumed with providing therapy and have little time to read scientific research, which typically is written in a technical manner geared for other researchers rather than for practitioners. Clinicians may not have access to manualized treatment protocols or to trainings in treatments covered in the manuals. Practitioners also may not have the authority to make decisions about types of treatments methods and practices to use and may be bound ...