Future of FNP's

In my area, the jobs are for FNPs nothing else! It may be the area of the country that you live in. The big push for the FNP is that they can see the client from birth to death and that helps keep them employed in a wide variety of situations.

Hey everyone,

So, I've heard lots of talk over the past few yrs about how fewer & fewer med students are going into family practice. Any opinions on how this may effect the future salaries of FNPs? I'm thinking it will go up once the baby boomer family docs start retiring. What do you guys think?

The problem with family medicine is that given the payor structure its hard to make any money. The payor structure is skewed toward specialties that do a lot of procedures. For example a visit for a cold or cough would bring in about $45-60 dollars. Sounds pretty good right. But you have expenses that will eat up most of that. So you end up with a decision. You can either crank patients through (I knew an FP that had 5 minute slots) or you can make less money.

Now factor in that reimbursement for NPs is 85% of the physician and that on the average NPs see 25% less patients than a FP physician and it is hard to see where the money is. The average FP salary is between $140-160k depending on where you look. You can make more if you do lot of procedures, do OB, or have a better payor mix. According to advance NPs that are in independent practice make the most at $90k. This would be in line with the differences in salaries posted above. Of course the lowest paid NP in the survey at $15k was also in independent practice.

David Carpenter, PA-C