NP or PA

Hello and Welcome to allnurses.com

Good to have you with us.

We moved your thread to the NP forum for better responses.

My passion is to deliver babies, do pre and post partum care, exam the newborn, and care for the infant the first few weeks.

If you wish to have delivery privileges with your role, you need to check out Midwifery programs. You might consider being a Certified Nurse Midwife (CNM). NPs normally do not have privileges to deliver the gravida. There are also combined programs as NP/CNM. Research this, too.

Also, check out this rather lengthy thread about Differences (Educative/Clinical) between NP & PA

We have a PA who posts here regularly and probably will weigh in on this thread, too: core0

Good luck with your decisions as healthcare provider. And, we hope you enjoy allnurses.com.

Hello all, I have read some great information on this site already! But i do need advice...my family is supportive but if I hear one more person say "i just wish you would make up your mind" i am going to scream!!

So here it goes, I am 26 and just graduated with a BS in psyc. as I thought i wanted to do school psychology, well shadowed and realized i still wanted to be in medicine. So for the past year I have volunteered at the clinic on post and got my MA certification. I love working in the clinic and realize even more so now that I need to be in medicine. Now to be honest i have thought about med school but it is just not for me...so I have been pursuing a PA for the past 2 semester (taking pre-reqs, A&P and chem) here is where i get lost and stand at a crossroad.

My passion is to deliver babies, do pre and post partum care, exam the newborn, and care for the infant the first few weeks. It seems the nurse practitioner route would allow me to do more of what i would like to do as opposed to the PA. But I am standing at this crossroads trying to figure out which way to take, if I take PA route, then i could possibly get in and graduate within the next 3 years.. then there is a chance i will not get to do what I really want to do which is obstetrics, then end up doing my second choice which is emergency med.

If I take the NP route i would have to add on another year just to become an Rn, then work until i am accepted into NP school. Just seems like I am closer to becoming a PA and feel like I should have a career by now especially with all the schooling I have already done.

I have spoke with docs here and they tell me different things about each..but seems the consensus is that NPs work more in the type of care I am wanting to do. Whew...do i take the leap into nursing and become an RN, if so how do i go about doing that?

I would agree with Siri that if you want to deliver babies then NP probably won't get you there. PA can potentially get you there. There are PAs with delivery privileges in around 35 states. However, compared to CNMs PAs attend to a miniscule amount of deliveries. There is also a PA OB/GYN post grad program where you will become well versed in deliveries among other things.

The issue that I think you need to realize, is that in all likelihood, the job you want does not exist. Theoretically some kind of CNM/FNP or PNP combination would allow you to follow the mothers and the infants (as would PA). However, there are almost no practices where this occurs. Pediatricians or FP follow the infants (and for longer than a few weeks) while obstetricians follow the mothers. The only place that you might find a situation like this is in family practice that also does OB. There is a PA in Georgia that works in a practice like this and has delivery privileges. With that you have to follow the rest of the lifespan as well.

If all you want to do is deliver babies then CNM is the way to go. If you want to go that way you should carefully examine the liability involved and the history of OB practice. Otherwise you have a number of options including PA school.

David Carpenter, PA-C