The Role of the Advanced Practice Nurse Essay
The Role of the Advanced Practice Nurse Essay
Introduction
The role of the advanced practice registered nurse (APRN) is continuously evolving, gaining recognition and enabling superior standards of care. In particular, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has led to an increase in practice authority for APNs and higher wages for medical professionals overall. Nevertheless, there is significant opposition to the establishment of the role, and numerous states continue restricting the work that nurses can do without supervision regardless of their competences or training. This essay discusses the benefits that APNs bring to the care and analyzes the impact of the ACA on the professional environment.The Role of the Advanced Practice Nurse Essay
The Impact of APRNs
Depending on their specialization, APRNs are capable of delivering high-quality care to a specific category of patients without the need for a doctor’s supervision. This quality benefits both medical specialists, who can concentrate on fewer patients and spend more time working with each one, and the patients, who receive competent care from a professional who knows the particulars of their conditions and can quickly and efficiently respond to any developments.
Institutions such as long-term care facilities benefit from employing APRNs as well as the latter can address a variety of patient health concerns without the need to keep a specialist on the staff for every category of illness or wait for one to arrive from a nearby hospital.
However, most of the above benefits can only be realized if the APRN has full practice authority (FPA), which enables him or her to work and prescribe specific medications without the need for a doctor’s supervision or control. According to Brom, Salsberry, and Graham (2018), while the number of states that allow FPA has been increasing at a faster rate after the implementation of the ACA, 28 states that restrict APRN authority continues to move for a change in federal policy. The need to consult doctors and report to them restricts an APRN’s ability to respond to health threats and provide care to rural communities, which impedes many of the advantages of the role.The Role of the Advanced Practice Nurse Essay
The Reasoning behind Authority Restrictions
There are two primary reasons why states that refuse to enable full practice authority as per the ACA do so. The first is the lack of trust in the role which arises from the decentralized nature of the United States and the resulting lack of unified legislation. Some states may consider the federal standards for becoming an APRN insufficient based on the lawmakers’ perception of the local education facilities, while others may believe the same for out-of-state facilities.
