Definition and Roles of a Nurse Practitioner
A nurse practitioner (NP) is an advanced practicing nurse, whose practice is focused on services that meet the general needs of community, individuals, families and groups. NP is one of the four types of dances practicing nurses, the other three - certified nurse midwife, certified registered nurse anesthetist, and clinical nurse specialist normally concentrate on a specific area of health, such as cancer care, gerontology, mental or national health. High level of demand for nurse practitioners that is caused by economic efficiency of these specialists as compared with doctors is a factor of the roles and focus of services provided by NP. When it comes to speaking about the scope of roles attributed to a nurse practitioner, they are broad. Earlier definitions address health promotion and disease prevention as well as involve diagnosis and management of common illnesses alongside with stable chronic diseases. Nurse practitioner's roles also include ordering, conducting, and interpreting laboratory tests alongside with prescriptions, treatments, and therapies. The general roles must then be matched with the specific theoretical background of a nurse practitioner and the field of practice. As such, the focus of the nursing practitioners' roles is on chronic health care treatment, performance of parental, child care, well-woman and adult care check ups, and, finally, health promotion and teaching alongside with disease prevention. Primary attention is given lately to patient - nurse practitioner relationships and the scope of NP roles in a given situation. Firstly, scholars emphasize advocacy relationships between the two, as there is a conflict between NP's freedom to practice and patients' rights and interests in health care settings. Ellen W. Bernal emphasizes the importance of friendly relationships between patients and medical personnel and the role of a nurse practitioner as a patients' advocate. Under this view, NPs are to identify unsafe and unethical practices and at the same time maintain own autonomy in order to be able to openly stand up to moral and ethical dilemmas. At the same time, the need to maintain treatment boundaries within the nurse client relationship is also one of the roles of nurse practitioners. As nurse find themselves working in different therapeutic settings working on his/her own or as a member of a team, the boundaries of client relationships are often a subject to testing. As such, one of the roles of NP is to adequately respond to the testing within the boundaries of professional integrity. Even though there is a large amount of literature addressing therapeutic treatment boundaries for nurse practitioners, it is impossible to address every situation and the issue still remains to be up to nurses' consent, whereas the role of NP is to establish and maintain working boundaries in patient relationships. About the author: Jennifer Burns is a professional freelance academic writer at Custom-Writing.org, custom dissertation writing service. Jennifer specializes in dissertation writing process. Do you like this article? Click here to read more!
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