What Are We Waiting For? Nurse Practitioners Can Fill Gaps in Our Ailing Health-care System

By Angela Preocanin

Nov. 13 to 19 marks Nurse Practitioner (NP) Week in Ontario, a time to both celebrate and increase awareness of the professional skills they bring to every sector of the health-care system.

We all know that Ontario’s health-care system is in a serious daily struggle to meet the needs of those in hospitals, long-term care homes, public health and the community. A record number of Ontarians do not have access to a primary-care provider, our emergency departments are overcrowded and at a crisis point, and those needing long-term care or home care are doomed to wait for far too long.

NPs are a key, underused resource that have the potential to alleviate many of these challenges.

Recently, the Ontario government announced it would fund up to 225 additional NPs to work in provincial long-term care homes. Unfortunately, as with much of what this government does, the funding will take three years to implement, and 225 NPs is far too few to truly make a difference in the province’s 627 long-term care homes.

Residents of long-term care homes are generally medically complex and would greatly benefit from the clinical skills and care that NPs provide. A decade ago, many of these patients would have been in hospital, not long-term care. The government’s plan to transfer alternate-level-of-care patients out of hospital and into long-term care makes it more vital than ever that these fragile patients have access to a high level of care.

For Ontarians who lack access to primary care, NPs can fill the gap.

For Ontarians who lack access to primary care – a key part of the health-care system – NPs can fill the gap. Their years of extra education give them skills and expertise to be the primary-care provider. They have a vast scope of practice that allows them to offer many clinical services that family doctors provide – they can examine, diagnose, order tests and refer patients to specialists. They are licensed to write prescriptions.

A study commissioned by the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions shows just how underutilized NPs truly are. The research found that NPs face limited employment opportunities, inappropriate levels of remuneration, work under outdated funding models, experience a lack of interprofessional collaboration are impacted by both legislative and regulatory barriers.

The lead researcher notes that Canada has just 14 NPs per 100,000 Canadians, one-fifth the per-capita supply of NPs in the U.S. Evidence shows that NPs improve access to holistic, cost-effective and high-quality health care that also reduces wait times and costs.

Right now, NPs could solve much of what is ailing health care. It’s past time to deploy the power of Nurse Practitioners. What are we waiting for?

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This post was previously published on HEALTHYDEBATE.CA and is republished under a Creative Commons license.

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The post What Are We Waiting For? Nurse Practitioners Can Fill Gaps in Our Ailing Health-care System appeared first on The Good Men Project.

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