As a patient, you do have the right to refuse to be treated by anyone. You may have to wait for a physician to be available, but no one can treat you without your consent and you can always ask for a provider’s title and licensure.
I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Nurse Practitioner without knowing exactly what the outcome would be, and realistically that does take a lot of burden off doctors so long as they correctly recognise what they should and shouldn’t do.
I expect that rules will catch up with the existence of LLMs, the problem is for those few generations that have to live through the transition period…
A huge piece of a physician’s medical training is knowing what questions to ask (as well as how and when to ask) to uncover the sneaky things that aren’t apparent on the surface. For example, as a 4th year medical student, I had a patient in the ER that came in with shortness of breath, fatigue, and chest discomfort. There were a couple hints of red flags, so I asked more questions that didn’t seem like they were related at all. Was he having unintended weight changes, night sweats, or changes to his bowel movements? The answer to all three was “yes”, but he had no idea why I was asking about that when he was there for breathing problems. I had a suspicion that he was having complications from metastatic cancer, and I was right. The resident I was working with hadn’t even thought to dig into those other niggling suspicions and was more focused on cardiac and pulmonary causes of chest pain and breathing problems.
I can almost guarantee that a nurse practitioner wouldn’t have asked those questions either. I keyed into some very subtle signs on his exam which prompted me to dig deeper, but NP’s aren’t even really trained on how to get a deeper history, let alone when to do so.
I guess I don’t really understand where they might fit in to an emergency room scenario. My experience with Nurse Practitioners is as a person that can take on some basic GP tasks to lighten the load.
For example, on of my kids has asthma and uses a regular inhaler. Instead of taking doctors time, they can book you in with the Nurse Practitioner to get a new prescription. That makes sense to me.
I do see that here, Nurse Practitioners are given a much wider scope including being able to assess test results and make a diagnosis, though I didn’t exactly read all the material thoroughly (heaps on info in the downloads on the right on this page, in case someone reading is interested).
It does say they need 4 years of experience and 300 hours of clinical learning (from what I can tell, they decide they want to be a Nurse Practitioner and they enter a programme of focused learning in a clinical setting). This seems at least more than what is required where the other user lives so I feel a little better, even if 300 hours is only like 7 weeks, at least they need that 4 years of experience 😅
These Nurse Practitioners are presumably already required to be highly skilled nurses? Please tell me that’s true 😑
Nope. They can (and these days often do) go straight from their nursing degree to an NP program with no real work experience.
Oh great. Just what I wanted to hear.
As a patient, you do have the right to refuse to be treated by anyone. You may have to wait for a physician to be available, but no one can treat you without your consent and you can always ask for a provider’s title and licensure.
I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Nurse Practitioner without knowing exactly what the outcome would be, and realistically that does take a lot of burden off doctors so long as they correctly recognise what they should and shouldn’t do.
I expect that rules will catch up with the existence of LLMs, the problem is for those few generations that have to live through the transition period…
A huge piece of a physician’s medical training is knowing what questions to ask (as well as how and when to ask) to uncover the sneaky things that aren’t apparent on the surface. For example, as a 4th year medical student, I had a patient in the ER that came in with shortness of breath, fatigue, and chest discomfort. There were a couple hints of red flags, so I asked more questions that didn’t seem like they were related at all. Was he having unintended weight changes, night sweats, or changes to his bowel movements? The answer to all three was “yes”, but he had no idea why I was asking about that when he was there for breathing problems. I had a suspicion that he was having complications from metastatic cancer, and I was right. The resident I was working with hadn’t even thought to dig into those other niggling suspicions and was more focused on cardiac and pulmonary causes of chest pain and breathing problems.
I can almost guarantee that a nurse practitioner wouldn’t have asked those questions either. I keyed into some very subtle signs on his exam which prompted me to dig deeper, but NP’s aren’t even really trained on how to get a deeper history, let alone when to do so.
I guess I don’t really understand where they might fit in to an emergency room scenario. My experience with Nurse Practitioners is as a person that can take on some basic GP tasks to lighten the load.
For example, on of my kids has asthma and uses a regular inhaler. Instead of taking doctors time, they can book you in with the Nurse Practitioner to get a new prescription. That makes sense to me.
I do see that here, Nurse Practitioners are given a much wider scope including being able to assess test results and make a diagnosis, though I didn’t exactly read all the material thoroughly (heaps on info in the downloads on the right on this page, in case someone reading is interested).
It does say they need 4 years of experience and 300 hours of clinical learning (from what I can tell, they decide they want to be a Nurse Practitioner and they enter a programme of focused learning in a clinical setting). This seems at least more than what is required where the other user lives so I feel a little better, even if 300 hours is only like 7 weeks, at least they need that 4 years of experience 😅