Credentialing

Question

Considering your role specialization (Family Nurse Practitioner), rank the top three current trends or issues that you believe to be most important with regard to credentialing. You will want to identify two strategies that address how these issues will strengthen advanced nursing practice. Synthesize knowledge from values theory, ethics and legal regulatory statutes, and develop your personal philosophy for a career as an advanced practice nurse.

Answers

Credentialing

In the current world, one major trend is the aging of the population. This phenomenon is being enabled by technological advancements, scientific developments, and improvement in biomedical research. For this reason, family nurse practitioners are increasingly operating in complex care and disease management environment associated with aging. Family Nurse Practice is one of the professions that have advanced in line with this current trend as a way of addressing the existing capacity gap in terms of the care being given to aging family members. The three current credentialing-related issues that these practitioners face today include prescription authority, the scope of practice, and reimbursement (Knight, 2010).

ORDER A PAPER LIKE THIS NOW

The operations of family nurse practitioners arerestricted by the Board of Medicine form making certain decision pertaining to prescriptions. This affects the role and practice of family nurse practitioners during the provision of caresince they are required to consult before prescribing any drug to patients. This leads to loss of valuable time, a problem that can easily be resolved by giving them authority to provide prescriptions. The second issue is scope of practice. The Board of Medicine also requires that the Advanced Nurse Practitioners prove that they have much capability before gaining the sole authority in their scope of practice. The last issue relates to reimbursement. Many advanced practice nurses are still struggling to acquire proper reimbursementfrom Medicaid, Medicare, and Third-Party Payers (Spross, Hamric, & Hanson, 2009).

To solve the reimbursement problems, nurses should be enlightened about elements of payment options such as Third party payers, Medicaid and Medicare during training. Moreover, stakeholders in the profession should be encouraged to continue advocatingfor equal pay despite difference in mode of care delivery (Austin, 2016). Similarly, family practice nurses should be enlightened on differences in regulatory barriers between states so that they do not violate the legal and ethical requirements during practice. However, the states should also strive to develop a system of mutual regulatory recognition which can easily be learned and followed by all the nurses.

References

Austin, D. (2016, May). Patient Care. Retrieved June 12, 2017, from University of California San Francisco: Science of Caring: https://scienceofcaring.ucsf.edu/patient-care/new-roles-nurse-practitioners-bring-opportunities-and-challenges

Knight, P. (2010). Current Issues for Advanced Practice Nurses.Web.

Spross, J., Hamric, A., & Hanson, C. (2009). Advanced practice nursing: An integrative approach . St.Louis,MO: Elsevier.