Doctors-in-short-supply-responsibilities-for-nurses-may-expand

There are financial considerations in addition to clinical ones. Nurse practitioners earn significantly less than primary care physicians and can provide comparable care at a lower cost. A RAND Corporation study that examined ways to control health care spending in Massachusetts found that increasing the use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants for certain types of office visits could save up to $8.4 billion by 2020.
Federal funding for nurse education has always been a sore spot among nurses. Unlike doctors in training, whose residencies are almost entirely funded by Medicare, most nursing education is self-financed. Nurse education received a little over $300 million in federal funding in 2006. Half of that amount was restricted to hospital diploma programs, which graduate only about 5 percent of nurses today.

The Senate Finance Committee bill would provide $50 million annually from 2012 through 2015 to fund a Medicare demonstration program for graduate nurse education. Participating hospitals would receive Medicare reimbursement for their education and clinical instruction costs. Meanwhile, the House health reform bill that was unveiled last week would authorize an additional $638 million to support nurse training from 2011 to 2015, including training for advanced practice nurses.

“This bill recognizes that we need more resources for graduate nursing education,” said Brenda Cleary, director of the Center to Champion Nursing in America a program of the AARP Public Policy Institute.

Nurse education received a little over $300 million in federal funding in 2006. Half of that amount was restricted to hospital diploma programs, which graduate only about 5 percent of nurses today.

I'm an ANP student training to do primary care of adults. I find it rather short sighted to be called a mid level provider who requires a collaborating physician (NYS requires a collaborating physician) do what I'm being trained to do. Studies show that NPs provide care that is holistically better than many physicians and which provide outcomes which are many times better than a physician in areas such as primary care, preventative care, diabetic care, and so on. I don't expect to do surgery, but I would like to be recognized for what I am going to be capable of doing and how well I will be able to do it.

In my opinion doctors should be reserved for specialized care/high risk cases. NPs should do 90% of the work. Health care would be a whole lot more affordable...if CNMs can save the US $8.5 billion/year by utilizing 75% of the patients, imagine what savings would come of utilizing NPs for all areas of heath care.

The problem with this is how do you know when a patient needs specialized care or that they symptoms you're looking at are not due to something more sinister than a common occurance? You can't deny that NP/DNP training is significantly less compared to that of physicians. So how would you know what to look for and refer patients to specialists? Yea it's true that the majority of cases walking in could be taken care of by a high school student following algorithms; the distinction between physicians and midlevels is the physicians' ability to distinguish between something routine and something worse. A routine patient visit could easily take a turn for the worse if the underlying condition is not caught in time.