Maybe this will help solve the state's doctor shortage, maybe it won't. In the meantime all parties agree, doctors and nurses will still need each other. "They are tremendously talented people. Their training is in demand," said Will Nicholson of APRN's.
Research has demonstrated that the nurse practitioner's expanded role has resulted in comparable and sometimes better patient outcomes than those of physicians. States with full practice authority have a statistically significant higher percentage of women than those with restricted practice.
One of the more contentious topics on my site is the scope of practice for non-physician providers, such as nurse practitioners. This echos the debate on the national stage where leaders of physician organizations, who want to protect their scope of practice, conflict with those of nurse practitioners’, who want to perform the tasks that physicians traditionally have.
The New Mexico Society of Anesthesiologists says a rule change adopted Monday by the state Board of Nursing “greatly compromises patient safety” but an emergency doctors group says it simply formalizes what nurses have been doing safely for years.
Although caring women and midwives had treated the sick and brought babies into the world for centuries, nursing as a respected profession had a tough road to travel. In England in the 1850s, Florence Nightingale brought nurses to the Crimea; in America during the Civil War, Clara Barton introduced nurses to battlefields and field hospitals, even to prison wards.
Five years ago, Canadian critical care specialist Dr. Daren Heyland walked out of an intensive care unit and never went back. That day, Heyland had been performing CPR and intubating a critically ill 84-year-old woman with a heart so worn out it could no longer be saved. Somehow the staff at the intensive care unit had been given orders to take every known measure to prolong her life. And she went into cardiac arrest.
Hospital workers who deal directly with patients wash their hands less frequently as their workday progresses, probably because the demands of the job deplete the mental reserves they need to follow rules. “That means two thirds of the time there is disconnect — patients are saying ‘keep me comfortable,’ and the chart is saying ‘you’re a full code,” Heyland said. “Full code” refers to doing everything possible to save a patient’s life. “If that isn’t an egregious medical error, I don’t know what is.”
UCF students working on their nursing degree who are seeking a Ph.D. now have the opportunity to take an online class at UCF to access world-class research facilities and university faculty. Florida's first online Ph.D. program is specifically designed to educate nurse scientists through UCF's College of Nursing Program, one of the nation's best online graduate programs for nursing.
Masthead
Editor-in Chief:
Kirsten Nicole
Editorial Staff:
Kirsten Nicole
Stan Kenyon
Robyn Bowman
Kimberly McNabb
Lisa Gordon
Stephanie Robinson
Contributors:
Kirsten Nicole
Stan Kenyon
Liz Di Bernardo
Cris Lobato
Elisa Howard
Susan Cramer
