An Exploration into the Nurse Practitioner Profession

Any Registered Nurse can become an Nurse Practitioner. All an RN has to do is achieve an advanced graduate level education in nursing, such as a Masters degree in nursing or Doctoral degree in nursing. Get some training in learning how to identify and diagnose illnesses and you can become an NP. All practitioners are health care professionals and they have similar privileges of an medical doctor. They can provide patients with services that are most definitely synonymous with those that a physician performs.

The real question though is how did this profession come about and was it a struggle to begin this career? Well, during the 1960s there was an nursing education program started at the University of Colorado by two physicians. These to physicians or educators were Loretta Ford and Henry Silver and they did this because of the fact that there was a serious shortage of health care providers in rural areas.

This job came about mainly because there was a lack of medical services being provided to young children, and it was this program that started the trend of the first practitioners graduating to practice medicine. During this same period, the 1960s, every nurse working at the time was not to pleased with the term and conception of a Nurse Practitioner because of the fact that they thought this nursing program was only teaching aspiring students how to become physicians, not nurses. They felt that this profession was going to confuse the differences between a nurse and a practitioner until the concept of nursing was no longer going to exist.

They felt that eventually everyone would just turn into physicians. All this aversion ceased and deceased when a few years passed and more practitioner programs started being created and more structured. The funny thing is that even though this profession was created in the 1960s, it was only until the year 2000 that practitioners were legally given the right to practice medicine. They could practice in each and every state including the Columbian district, but they were given rule and regulations regarding the scope of their practice and what they could do in each state with the title of  a NP.

There are many men and women working as a Nurse Practitioner who want full autonomy in what they can do in medicine. To put it simply, they are tired of being supervised for everything they do. While its only right to seek consultation from a physician, practitioners have been trained and educated in similar ways of a MD and this is why they feel they should have the right to practice without supervision. This is a great and rewarding medical profession, but it does have its challenges.

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