Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants in Primary Care

Abstract

ssues pertaining to health care quality, access to care, reimbursement, nd increasing health care costs are influencing the U.S. health care ystem. The roles of the nurse practitioner (NP) and physician assistant PA) in health care are crucial today in providing access to care and nsuring efficiency of care, while maintaining the quality of care given to he public. Since NPs and PAs have come into existence, they have elped with holding down health care costs, providing care to undererved populations, and enabling physician practices to better serve their atients. Availability of care and physician shortage became growing ssues in health care. Increasing demands on physicians in terms of intensity and complexity” of the care required began to exist. One way o combat the challenges of health care is to utilize the role of NP and PA. Ps and PAs can be used in a physician’s practice. These two disciplines ere developed to alleviate the national shortage of primary care hysicians by training people who could do some of the physician’s tasks. There are approximately 100,000 NPs and 60,000 PAs practicing in the .S. today. Those numbers have more than doubled since 1990. In fact, ccording to Roblin, NP/PAs are capable of potentially seeing 50% to 5% of all primary care visits. Given their track record, employing NPs nd PAs in primary care settings seems like a logical choice. Forty ercent of NPs are trained as family NPs and 10% are trained in ediatrics. Other NPs are trained to specialize, unlike PAs who are always rained as generalists with half in medical offices and the other half in ospitals, public health, nursing homes, and other settings. NPs and PAs re used by approximately one-quarter of primary care physicians, seeing early the same types of patients as the physician. Family physicians are