Nurse practitioner Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Nurse practitioner - Essay Example within the present structure of the available health services mainly in order to facilitate their journey within the healthcare continuum (Sweet, 2005). Nurse practitioners have responded to this social and political need and professional challenge through expansion of the scopes of their practice with action, plan, and rigor. As a result in today’s changing contexts, this professional role has literally evolved into development of skills and expansion of scope of practice so this category of service providers can provide efficient, safe, comprehensive, and accessible care to the patients and the communities (Ashington Audit Group., 2004). Before going into the critical examination of the conditions of this development and its social and political contexts, it would be prudent to define a nurse practitioner. According to Australian Nurse Practitioners Association, nurse practitioners are senior clinical nurses within their specialty of choice with a Masters of equivalent degree and registered with the state nursing boards (Redshaw and Harvey, 2001). Professionally they are experienced with high level of skills suitable for different healthcare settings. The political motive for this role is to support the existing system of patient care while at the same time improving access of people to care that may be adequate or even better for certain clinical conditions. In the Australian context, the nurse practitioners are able to cater to the health needs of the population independently through their clinical skills and are able to meet the health needs of the population at the given level through their ability to recognize the holistic health needs in the context of their environments. In any way, this provision is not designed to provide care that is does not fulfill the competency standards of healthcare delivery. They provide services with accountability within this extended scope of practice in conformity with the evidence that nurse practitioners are quite able