Want to Support Frontline Workers? Let Nurse Practitioners Do What They Do Best.

Question: since the onset of Covid-19, how many times have we heard, “Support our frontline workers?” How much have we read about health care provider shortages, full emergency rooms and ICUs, and medical professional burnout due to the pandemic? How much do we love our nurses?

The answer to all these questions is the same: a lot.

But I want to talk about a specific type of nurse: a Nurse Practitioner, or NP. Nurse Practitioners are health care providers with advanced degrees in nursing in variety of fields — family health, pediatrics, gerontology, etc. In Pennsylvania, there are 16,300 NPs. Most often, when you go to the doctor’s office, it’s actually a Nurse Practitioner you’re seeing. You’re also more likely to see NPs in rural parts of our state, providing essential medical care to communities who would otherwise face the prospect of traveling hours to receive it. NPs prescribe our medicine, provide treatments, and can admit us and to hospitals when needed.

It is no secret that we are facing a workforce shortage crisis in health care providers. Even before the pandemic, we knew that Pennsylvanians needed greater access to care. Pennsylvania’s Joint State Government Commission warned close to a decade ago that the healthcare workforce could not meet growing demands.

But we are losing NPs in Pennsylvania to other states because of archaic rules that have not caught up with the times and the advancement in medicine. To practice as an NP in Pennsylvania, you have to contract with not one, but two physicians. Did I mention the shortage of doctors in PA, especially in rural PA? Good luck finding a doctor or two to contract with who also has the time and capacity to truly collaborate with the NP. More than 100 studies over 50 years have shown that Nurse Practitioners provide patient health outcomes as good or better than other providers. Enabling full practice authority for NPs is already a proven solution in all 24 other states that have enacted this policy, including our neighbors in Delaware and Maryland. We are losing NPs to these other states.

All of this points to why our team at Denny Civic Solutions is proud to announce that we will be working with the Pennsylvania Coalition of Nurse Practitioners (PCNP) to push for full practice authority in Pennsylvania once and for all. We thank them for their trust in us, and look forward to making full practice authority a reality in the Commonwealth.

I started this post by asking several questions. I finish this post with one last question and an answer.

Question:

How can we support our frontline health care workers?

Answer:

We can start by doing what 24 other states and the District of Columbia have already done:

Grant full practice authority to Pennsylvania’s 16,300 Nurse Practitioners.