APNs as Policy Healthcare Leaders How Healthcare Policy Can Impact the APN (Advanced Practice Nurse) Profession

There has been volatile debate about policy reformation and the practice scope in all states in the United States. Nurse practitioner’s practice scope policy has arguably been stated to affect care access. Following the fact that over half of Americans have experienced the challenges of inadequate access to health care economically, societally, and personally, policy reform by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has aimed to eliminate the scope of practice restrictions at the state level for nurse practitioners (Patel, Petermann, & Mark, 2019). The supporters of removing policies on the range of practice of nurse practitioners state that the policies strategically prevent the nurse professionals from practicing to their maximum capacity to enhance care access (Patel, Petermann, & Mark, 2019). Patel, Petermann, & Mark (2019) state that restrictive nurse practitioner scope of practice policies may constrain the ability of nurse practitioners to deliver all the healthcare services they are trained and built to perform. The requirements in the policy, such as physician supervision, can also restrict nurse practitioners from providing care to persons living in underserved or under-resourced places because there are low numbers of physicians in such areas to provide supervisory roles to the nurse practitioners (Goodfellow et al., 2016). Besides, physician supervisors may oblige nurse practitioners to remunerate them for supervisory work, making it even more challenging for nurse practitioners’ practices to be more financially feasible or even to provide care for uninsured patients and those insured by the government (Patel, Petermann, & Mark, 2019).

On the other hand, those who support the nurse practitioner scope of practice policies are mainly physicians who claim that removing these policies can negatively impact patient outcomes and safety (Hain & Fleck, 2014). However, no solid studies have demonstrated that advanced nurses’ care is of poor quality or unsafe. On the contrary, many studies have shown that nurse practitioner-delivered care is better or equal to that of physicians in similar care settings (Patel, Petermann, & Mark, 2019).