Can a primary care family nurse practitioner work in urgent care?

Nursing Students NP Students

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I am applying to a primary care FNP program and my goal is to work in urgent care. Can this be done with it being primary care?

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Specializes in ER.

Well, in my state they have not really separated the FNPs. FNPs frequently work in ERs, in hospitals, urgent cares, and clinics around here.

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Specializes in Hospitalist Medicine.

It depends on the area you live in. Where I'm at, you need to have dual FNP/ACNP to work in the ER. Most urgent care facilities around here would prefer you have FNP so you can see patients of all ages. It would be worth it to check around at places you're interested in to see what they prefer before you apply to programs. I would have simply done ACNP without the FNP if I hadn't checked in to it.

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I am actually confused about what is "urgent care." Rather I'm not really sure what deffinition is most accurate. According to my school the clinics called "urgent care" are actually retail clinics and the "urgent care" at hospitals are called "fast track," I'm told this is for billing purposes.

My FNP program says we can do half our second semester clinical hours at a retail clinic (Minute Clinic etc) I have not asked about at the hospital.

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Specializes in Telemetry, nursing education, FNP.

I just finished an FNP program and our program was very specific about what rotations we could have: internal medicine and family practice offices mostly. They would let us do a number of hours in a specialty outpatient clinic (cardiology office, derm office, etc.) and a number of hours in an urgent care. They would NOT let us do any hours in an ER because they considered it outside of our scope. So it seems they drew the line at urgent care: okay, ER: not okay for an FNP.

I do believe it has a lot to do with where you live and what's currently being accepted in that area. I live in Michigan and I'll actually be signing on to an urgent care practice in the next few weeks. Employers are, at least in this area, getting more specific about hiring NPs that are staying within their scope (i.e. hospitals are only hiring Acute Care NPs).

I'm not sure if that helped you at all, but that's been my experience. Feel free to message me with any other questions. :)

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Specializes in Adult Internal Medicine.

Urgent Care around here prefer FNPs due to age restrictions.

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