Talking About Nursing
We’ve been going through the various forms of nurse specialty recently which is, of course, useful, but we’ve been working with current information. Health care (whoever wins the next election) is going to go through some radical changes in the years to come so what the industry and job opportunities will be like in the future will also be an interesting subject. Given that prediction (especially, as the old joke has it, about the future) is very difficult, it’s not possible to be certain. However, this blog post is interesting. It talks about primary care clinics in drug stores as a way of providing cheaper health care. The important thing is that they are run by nurse practitioners (although such will be under the supervision of a fully qualified doctor as well).
Nurse practitioners are registered nurses, so they have gone through the usual one of the three possible entry routes: a four year college degree, or a two year one, or the one year Diploma program, and then also passed their licence exam. But over and above that they also have a further college degree, a Master’s. This means that, to a certain level, that they are allowed to both diagnose and prescribe, thus being able to treat patients for most thing. For one of the lesser known facts about medicine is that 95 % (some say more) is entirely routine. Doctors and their more advanced skills are really only needed in a small fraction of cases.
What this does do for the nursing profession is open up a new career route. Running (or staffing) one of these centres and rather than being the helpmeets of doctors, standing in a position somewhere between a doctor and a nurse. It’s going to be interesting how it all works out (the biggest opposition will come from the American Medical Association, the trade union for doctors) but as long as an efficient method is put in place of dealing with that small minority of cases that the clinics cannot handle, it’s going to make health care both better and more affordable, not to say convenient.
