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Nurse Practitioners Help Relieve Primary Care Shortage

By Karen Zeller – President, Rocky Mountain Medical Search

Meeting the demands for clinical services where they are needed most – in primary care – is increasingly falling to nurse practitioners. According to the American Association of Nursing, 60–80% of primary care can be performed by nurse practitioners. Additionally, the growing emphasis on prevention and public health will provide even more excellent and diverse opportunities for nurse practitioners.

Classified as mid-level providers, nurse practitioners and physician assistants are often evaluated and associated together. However, they are trained differently and treated differently by state regulatory agencies. Many states grant the authority for nurse practitioners to practice independently. The goal of nurse practitioners is independence and collegiality, rather than dependence and supervision.

The doctoral level nurse practitioners will further expand the scope of practice for nurse practitioners. These nurse practitioners are trained to practice at the level of family physicians with full hospital admitting privileges. These clinicians can provide care at a range of sites: hospital inpatient and emergency departments, offices, nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities.

Research shows high levels of patient satisfaction with nurse practitioner providers. Studies focus mainly on clinical quality and effectiveness and continue to provide supportive data. Throughout these studies, health outcomes were similar to those of physicians, with equal or lower costs, shorter waiting times, and higher patient satisfaction.

Bonnie J. Nesbitt, PhD, ANP-BC; Director of Graduate Program of Nursing at Viterbo University in LaCrosse, Wisconsin is seeing changes in the practices their graduates are choosing. Many more graduates are specializing in fields including cardiology, acute adult care (Mayo Clinic utilizes nurse practitioners as hospitalists), pain management, palliative care, and neurology. Dr. Nesbitt reports that slightly more than half of their graduating nurse practitioners are choosing specialty practices.

How will this affect recruitment for nurse practitioners in the future? Recruiting primary care nurse practitioners will become more competitive as more graduates choose specialties. Nurse practitioner students tend to be part-time students fully integrated in the communities where they receive their graduate training. Thus, the talent pool is more likely to remain regional or local. A good strategy for recruiting nurse practitioners is to cultivate relationships with the nearest graduate training programs.

According to the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners (AANP), there are 125,000 nurse practitioners in practice in the U.S. today. Eighty-five percent of these are practicing in primary care settings, defined as adult health care, family medicine, women's health and pediatrics. Three hundred twenty-five schools in the U.S. are graduating approximately 6000 nurse practitioners annually.

The 2008 compensation survey by the American Medical Group Association (AMGA) shows $87,627 as the mean salary for a full-time nurse practitioner.