Offline: Nursing, but not as you know it

Abstract

Family practitioners in the US are facing extinction. In their place must come nurse-practitioners. Nurses are better educated to navigate and refer patients to specialists. They don’t have any illusions about managing complex illness. Their lower threshold for referral means less risk of missing diagnoses or delaying expert care. This is one vision for nursing to be found at the University of Pennsylvania’s extraordinary School of Nursing. The Penn health system is astonishing in many ways. It is part of a university—led by its President, Amy Gutmann—that has transformational knowledge, policy, and global ambitions. Gutmann is creating an epistemological supercollider at Penn. Her recent appointment of Zeke Emanuel illustrates how. By creating a series of Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) professors—Zeke Emanuel is the 13th—she is trying to foster a new era of interdisciplinarity. Emanuel has an explicit policy remit, sitting between the School of Medicine and the Wharton School where he will mix ethics with health-care management. But he also has to fulfi l the university’s global mission, as vice-provost for global initiatives. Having been President Obama’s intellectual guide on health-care reform, he has arrived at Penn to deliver similarly unprecedented change.