Will nurses be the new primary care providers?

The health care system has done its best to drive physicians out of primary care, to be replaced by nurses:

The healthcare system sees nurses as professionals who (once they are duly certified in primary care medicine through respected testing organizations), will have just enough training to diagnose and treat the average patient (i.e., the ones with high blood, low blood, fat blood and sugar), and who will cheerfully, unquestioningly follow whatever guidelines are handed down to them from on high. And they will do all this for less pay and with less lip than the now-obsolete physician PCPs. These new practitioners of primary care medicine will be a perfect fit.

But there’s one problem, as DrRich observes. Nurses want no part of it, which “should tell us how smart nurses really are.”

topics: primary care, nurses