Event Report: The PCNP Annual Educational Conference
Last month, the DCS team headed to Hershey, PA to join the Pennsylvania Coalition of Nurse Practitioners at their Annual Educational Conference. This year’s conference featured 45 different sessions for continuing education, with over 300 PCNP members in attendance! Chock full of informative workshops, passionate speakers, and (of course) Hershey’s chocolate, the conference was incredibly insightful, even for non-NPs like us. We had the fortune of meeting many of PCNP’s members, old and new, and listening to their thoughts on the future they want to see for nurse practitioners. Having attendees flock to our table to take pictures with the super cool Instagram frame we made definitely helped. (It wasn’t the pile of candy, we swear!)
Some major highlights of the conference included a session on Evidence-Based Contraception with an Adolescent Focus to increase PCNP members’ awareness of patient choices in a post-Roe America, and one on Gender Affirming Care in the Primary Care Setting for NPs who see transgender and non-binary patients. And with youth depression on the rise at 25% globally, Depression, Suicidality, and Self-Injury among Children and Adolescents addressed the major increase in youth depression since 2020 by providing NPs with new information and resources. These timely topics really demonstrated how PCNP’s membership cares for the past, present, and future of patients. After all, NPs care for the whole patient; it’s what makes them so important!
Another group also sees a bright future for Pennsylvania, and it starts with looking to our neighbor, Maryland. The Commonwealth Foundation, a PA-based free-market think tank, recently released a report on the benefits of giving NPs full-practice authority; that is, allowing nurse practitioners to provide care to the full extent of their training, without needing to maintain unnecessary and burdensome “collaborative agreements” with at least two physicians.. By looking at the effects of FPA on Maryland, the Commonwealth Foundation came to some startling findings — like how fully utilizing the current NP population as primary care providers could reduce the number of geographic healthcare shortage areas in PA by almost half. This doesn’t even begin to cover the positive effects that FPA had on Maryland’s patients, or how it would increase the number of patients able to be seen by NPs every week.
As any NP will tell you – nothing is more important to them than patient care. At the same time, nothing is more important to patient care than our Nurse Practitioners.