Nurse Practitioners Rise

Marguerite Harris and her staff of eight provide prenatal care and child immunizations, write prescriptions, and diagnose and treat ailments from diabetes to the sniffles. Though it may sound like a typical doctor's office, no one on staff at Project Salud is a doctor. Nurse runs the medical center -- registered nurses with specialized training and advanced degrees -- whose numbers have risen from 30,000 in 1990 to 115,000 today.

Increasingly, health care professionals are treating patients with N.P. after their name instead of M.D. or D.O. Nurse-managed primary care centers such as Project Salud have increased to about 250 nationwide, from just a few 15 years ago.

"We've come a long way since the early days, the knock-down, drag-outs with doctors who thought we were overstepping our roles," said Miss Harris, a nurse practitioner at the Philadelphia-area medical center since 1974. The change is attributed to factors that include a drop in the number of doctors choosing primary care as their specialty. The reduction is expected to continue.

Nurse practitioners first appeared about 40 years ago in pediatrics, and quickly expanded into obstetrics and gynecology, family medicine and adult primary care. They can perform many of the duties of primary care doctors such as performing physical exams, diagnosing and treating common health problems, prescribing medications, ordering and interpreting X-rays, and providing family-planning services.???

For more information about the Nurse Practitioner career in Minnesota, please see http://www.iseek.org/sv/Careers?id=13000:120042

Source: Washington Times, 6/26/06