subject: Critical Care – Differences between a Nurse and a Nursing Practitioners [print this page] Nurses are health care professionals whose task is to aid the resident doctor in administering patient care. Nurses are the ones who are given the responsibility to take care of patients while the doctor is busy attending to other people. In dire emergencies when the doctor is away and is physically unable to tend to the patient on time, the nurse is also given the task to administer first-aid procedures to buy the resident some time.
However, with the major advances in medicine and related fields, every medical procedure has become laden with so many factors to consider for proper implementation. Furthermore, many patients develop special needs that are difficult to appropriately address. Aside from the medical side, any health care worker is also burdened with dealing with the legal, logistic, and administrative side of every action.
Registered nurses were trained for four long years in order to be eligible for the state board. They have studied every major medical field, and have also undergone courses that are specifically targeted to the nursing profession. However, recent studies have shown that given the complexity of the status quo, some hospital departments need nurses with a greater amount of training.
Hence, nursing practitioners were born. Nursing practitioners are also registered nurses, except that they have gained graduate and post-graduate degrees which better equip them in dealing with very advanced situations. Moreover, nursing practitioners have risen in popularity mainly due to the lack of medical residents in hospitals today.
Nursing practitioners are usually assigned to hospital departments that deal with advanced or critical cases, such as the oncology, cardiology and radiology sections. Furthermore, they may also deal with urgent legal matters that concern their ward and the hospital itself, like facilitating the processing of Do Not Resuscitate requests for terminally ill patients who wish to discontinue medication. Because of their more advanced education, they are more effective at explaining to the doctor the exact situation of a patient, thus improving the speed of diagnoses and treatments.
Nurses are very capable professionals. However, there are just some cases that are too advanced, so much so that nursing practitioners need to come in.
Critical Care Differences between a Nurse and a Nursing Practitioners
