Nurse practitioners could help fill the void, advocates for the profession say, if more provinces would adopt policies to integrate them into primary care and pay them fairly for their work. Some physicians’ organizations have pushed back against that approach, arguing that NPs don’t have as much training or education as family doctors and therefore should only be funded publicly when they’re embedded in interdisciplinary teams with MDs.
Aren’t these the same organizations that have been dragging their feet on recognizing foreign credentials?
I’ve been seeing a nurse practitioner for the last couple of years. So far, she’s provided the same level of care I’m used to from family doctors: prescriptions, forwarding me to specialists when appropriate, providing the usual advice during checkups. It’s fine.
Edit: took out my grumbly summary, since our healthcare spending seems to be middle of the pack, compared to peer countries.
Maybe we should, as a society, make the profession of physician suitably attractive so that we don’t have a huge shortage of qualified people motivated to do this job instead of having this generation’s clever people working out how to make people watch more ads.
Oh there’s so many people who want to be doctors! No shortage of that.
What ends up is the extremely difficult admission process, poor mentorship/training structure, long work hours, and low salary; at the end you are rewarded with high salary and prestige, but very few makes it that far.
There are lots of people who want to get into healthcare. We don’t have enough spots in post secondary education to train them all.
We refuse to hire some trained healthcare providers, like the nurse practitioners described in the article, and folks with credentials from elsewhere.
We have the people. We don’t have the will to employ them properly.
Woah, slow down there, commie. I can still kind of do stuff, like watch TV or games without being completely blocked by advertisements. There’s still value to be wrung out for the shareholder. Why do you hate freedom?
Why not simply pay GPs a decent wage, thereby attracting more people into the industry?
The issue is they pay specialists grossly unreasonable wages, so thats where all the 2nd+ generation med students who have the best chamce at leaping over all of the arbitrary hurdles to med achool acceptance set their sights.
Wages are not a zero-sum issue. Raise the wages of GPs, and that gap narrows. With a narrower gap, fewer students will try to hop it, as the benefits are less. Or in other words, it becomes easier and more profitable to be a GP.
There is no reason why specialist wages need to be eviscerated. You can have high wages for both specialists and GPs. And in the end, we need plenty of people going into both.
There is no reason why specialist wages need to be eviscerated
Yes, there is. We pay specialists fuck-you money, and enable a rigid social hierarchy within a profession that exists to help others.
It’s already questionable that GPs are underpaid. Overworked, sure, but they already make signidicantly more than the median income, and well above a living wage, in a society where many work twice as long and just as hard for peanuts.
As a society, we don’t need to be enabling the structural narcisim of medical specialists with kingly wages. It’s a social sickness.
If specialists want to out-earn the rest of us by a factor of 5 or more, maybe they should work 5 or more jobs.
Wow, that is one of the most bleedingly ignorant things I have read in a damn long time.
They already are. My work benefits include a service where I can video chat with a NP any time and I don’t have to wait as long for an appointment, which has been handy when I just need some quick advice or a prescription cream for my little ones. We have a family doctor and I love her but she typically books a few weeks out so I only make appointments with her for annual checkups and more serious talks that I can put off for a while.
My work benefits include a service where I can video chat with a NP any time and I don’t have to wait as long for an appointment
Mine doesn’t. I believe we need to try different models of care delivery, but I’m really leary of privately funded healthcare.
My publicly funded NP has done day-of calls, and usually books urgent appointments promptly.
Could nurse practitioners fill the primary care gap?
Not if we can’t provide childcare for those nurses to be able to work.
Nurse Practitioner. I know “Nurse” is in the name, but they are completely separate jobs.
We’re splitting hairs: “Nurse practitioners (NPs) are registered nurses who have additional education and nursing experience…” (SOURCE)
The same need for childcare still applies, no matter where on the spectrum of nursing someone decides to be on.
I agree with your points on childcare, though I don’t think this is the right place to discuss it.
I disagree about splitting hairs. Being specific helps avoid confusion. So many times in discussions about utilizing more Nurse Practitioners, either online or in person, someone says something like, “I don’t think I’d trust a Nurse with that. What do they know about diagnosing conditions, etc, etc, etc.” It’s gotten better over the past little while, but the confusion is real, and I think it’s worthwhile to keep it clear.
Fair points re:the distinction for those who don’t know the difference.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ms. Lamphier has a dozen years of experience as a nurse practitioner, a professional designation that allows her to perform many of the same tasks as a family doctor, including diagnosing illnesses, writing prescriptions, ordering tests, and making referrals to specialists.
When Ms. Lamphier finished covering a maternity leave at a Windsor practice last fall, she found there were no publicly funded job openings for primary-care NPs in her area.
Ms. Lamphier’s predicament puts her smack in the middle of a national debate about the role and remuneration of nurse practitioners at a time when as many as 6.5 million Canadians say they don’t have a family doctor or other primary-care provider.
Nurse practitioners could help fill the void, advocates for the profession say, if more provinces would adopt policies to integrate them into primary care and pay them fairly for their work.
Some physicians’ organizations have pushed back against that approach, arguing that NPs don’t have as much training or education as family doctors and therefore should only be funded publicly when they’re embedded in interdisciplinary teams with MDs.
After Premier Danielle Smith fleshed out the NP plan at a news conference on April 25, Paul Parks, the president of the association, said in an interview that it could work well if it bolsters team care with physicians.
The original article contains 1,470 words, the summary contains 219 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’d settle for my provincial government not actively fucking over health care, ripping up contracts with doctors, and then wondering where all the doctors went…
Could nurse practitioners fill the primary care gap?
Oh look, another way to avoid funding the healthcare system!
I don’t mean to demean NPs, but this is like saying “Can EAs fill the teaching gap?”. Sure, they could, in theory, but they won’t because the government doesn’t see NPs as a solution per se; instead, they’re a way to avoid spending money and create a two-tiered system where if you want to see a doctor you have to pay, but if you want to try and see an overworked, undercompensated NP you might be able to, if we actually had any.
