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SDW news brief: Nurse education key to scope-of-care debate

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, August 19, 2011

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 The nursing profession is in an upheaval.

On one hand, there is pressure to push registered nurses and their teaching colleges to begin or augment nurses' careers with higher levels of training and skill, so nurses will be better prepared for new tasks required as the industry changes. These nurses need to manage quality metrics and patient care continuum models, hospital chiefs and doctors say. Nurses need to be critical thinkers, and understand value-based purchasing and what that could mean to the hospital's bottom line.

Nurses want more opportunities to learn alongside doctors, in classrooms and in direct patient care settings with more and longer residency programs in hospitals. And more faculty members are needed to train them.

But there is also tension on another front between nursing leadership and some physician groups over limits now placed in many states over the scope of what advanced practice nurses, including nurse practitioners, should be allowed to do. They should be able to function to the full extent of their education and training and be paid directly for their services, nursing advocates say. Organized medicine groups who are fighting these efforts, such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Family Practitioners, should get over it, nursing advocates say.

After all, the shortage of physicians across all specialties is expected to quadruple, with a shortfall in the workforce of 63,000 by 2015 and 91,000 by 2020, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Who, the nursing advocates ask, will pick up the slack? It's going to be the nurses, they say.

Someone's going to have to work alongside-and in some cases instead of-doctors to guide the 32 million newly insured, plus meeting the demands of aging boomers who will be seeking high-quality care in greater numbers. Surely that will be the task for the estimated 266,000 advanced practice registered nurses, if not many of the 2.7 million other registered nurses in the United States: making sure patients stay healthy and compliant, preventing them from coming back to or entering the hospital in the first place.

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Source: HealthLeaders Media

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