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This is a repost from today’s Primary Care Progress. HealthCetera and Primary Care Progress are modeling that interprofessional exchange matters to advance the public’s health. We’re celebrating Nurses Week together.

The IOM’s 2010 report The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health called for “nurses [to] be full partners, with physicians and other health care professionals, in redesigning health care in the United States.” We need a culture of collaboration and interprofessionalism in education and practice. Here, an R.N. makes the case for interprofessionalism in family medicine in this post that originally ran in 2012 on STFM’s blog.

By Courtney Kasun, R.N., M.N.Sc.

One year ago, I began teaching in an interprofessional student clinic. The student clinic itself had been around for decades, staffed by students in our family medicine clerkship. However, after a recent campus-wide push for more interprofessional education across health care disciplines, we began adding nursing and pharmacy students to our clinic and having all the students see patients as an interprofessional team.

HealthCetera

Nursing Is Storytelling

May 7, 2013

author: Editorial Staff

3 Comments

This guest post is by nurse Amy

Health, Policy

The future of nursing in primary care. An interview with Virginia P. Tilden, PhD RN FAAN

May 6, 2013

author: Editorial Staff

1 Comment

This is a repost from Primary Care Progress and the first of our celebrating Nurses Week 2013.

photocredit: Primary Care Progress

The future of nursing in primary care
An interview with Virginia P. Tilden, Ph.D., R.N., F.A.A.N.
By Sonya Collins

Thank you for giving us an interview for National Nurses Week.

I’m very pleased to know that PCP is honoring National Nurses Week. And I hope in the future that it’s joined by a Team-Based Care Week that is all about doing the right thing for patients.

I love that idea. And how do you see the role of nurses in primary care evolving in the coming years? How do you see this role in ten years?

I see nurses in both staff and provider positions having a vital and expanding role and a responsibility for reinventing primary care now and in the years ahead.

In the staff role in traditional primary care practices, the RN typically does patient triage, telephone advice, and prescription management, sometimes including case management and chronic care management. Overall job satisfaction in this role typically is low, and burnout and turnover are high, such that medical assistants have tended to step into this staff role.

However, important reinvention of the RN staff role is happening now with exciting results. A recent ABIM Foundation study of innovative primary care practices found many RNs playing a different role. Care in these practices is typically team-based with RNs working at the top of their licenses as care coordinators, case managers, and systems specialists, resulting in much better patient care and higher morale for everyone, including physicians.