Considering remote or rural nursing a specialty

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I am writing a paper that I hope will re-introduce the discussion on Rural Nursing a Specialty in USA. Please help me by responding to this question.

With the start of registration for affordable health care, it is predicted that 32 million new patients will be admitted to the health care system. The forecast for health care staffing in general is poor, in 2020 there will be a severe shortage of doctors and nurses. Currently the health care system in the Rural and Remote areas is already poor. Some states are hiring Advanced Practice Nurses to work independently in undeserved and low income areas. With the uniqueness of the rural nursing practice, and the differences in the nursing practice r/t health care delivery based on limited resources, performance of procedure s/p education that are not done in urban areas, should rural/ remote nursing be considered a specialty a separate entity from Public Health Nursing?

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Specializes in Critical Care, ED, Cath lab, CTPAC,Trauma.

What semester are you in?

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Specializes in Emergency.

I am not sure about being a "specialty," that is already one of the major obstacle/push-backs to the ACA-all these greedy doctors/"specialists" that are so scared of this so-called "socialism." Its quite comical actually...more access means more jobs in my mind...besides we already have the infrastructure in place...check out the Indian health service ihs.gov, and each state has a local federally funded regional/rural office etc...just like public schools, we need to better what we already have in place and it will flourish once we get more people with access-as it should be in this "advanced" nation of ours....now if we could only get the people out there so afraid of change to wake up! seems like Hippocrates has gone by the wayside!

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I am in my second BSN Semester

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Specializes in Critical Care, ED, Cath lab, CTPAC,Trauma.

We are happy to help....however we need to know what you think first....what has your research taught you?

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Thank You Esme. I know that the assignment is that they want to see if I know the steps of developing a research paper. but I would also like to include the actual responses from actual nurses on their opinion about the subject. Currently I have found that the biggest obstacle to specializtiion is that it is very difficult to define what rural or remote actually is .U. S Census has a definition, United Nations has a different definition, World Health Organization has another. I Also learned that remote and rural nurses wsork in low income or underserved areas of the country, but they are considered Public Health Nurses. In Urban areas nurses working in a hospital setting are not considered public health. Please see my post to Grn Tea. I did come up with a questionaire.

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