There is a patient in front of you. You are a nurse practitioner; the individual beside you is a medical practitioner. Both of you have the same information. Both of you have the same goal, or do you? Do you want wellness for the patient, including the social, emotional, nutritional, and familial aspects of that patient’s life or do you want the injury/illness/infection gone and the patient back to routine living? They seem like divergent views, the nursing model and the medical model, but as the environment of healthcare changes, can a path be found so both can thrive?

In Creative Nursing, Tim Porter-O’Grady (2003) discusses that we are moving into a new healthcare relationship with our patients, one that will increase the patient’s expectation of positivity and will require all professions to work in a seamless fashion. Healthcare is becoming patient–owned (Porter-O’Grady, 2003) and that type of pattern will necessitate “working ‘together’ rather than working ‘alongside’” (Davies C, 2000). We have moved into a new social-evolutionary age, one of informatio

Healthcare is a traditional hierarchal system of role authority. In Thomas May’s discussion of the relationship between nurse and physician (Journal of Medical Ethics, 1993), he illustrates that the foundation of the physician’s right of authority is in the standardized level of education and appropriate credentialing that physicians have in order to make judgments about what is wrong with the patient and what is the correct treatment. Nursing education is designed more to the understanding of the orders to be given, not in the assessment of the problem and its treatment. While May acknowledges that nursing is far more than medicine’s servant, he maintains that nursing education is not to the advanced level of medicine. That remains an important criterion for the requirement of supervision. And until that is changed and the safety of patients can be demonstrated the physician organizations and individual physicians are correct in their insistence of right to supervise nurse practitioner care.

Some topics in this essay:
Tim Porter-O’Grady, Academic Medicine, Robinson Inyang, Zwarenstein Reeves, Medical Ethics, Policy H-360987, Celia Davies, Medical Practitioner, Association AMA, Argument Partnered, nurse practitioner, primary care, relationship nurse, relationship nurse practitioner, quality care, nursing education, collaborative practice, nurse practitioners, nursing medicine, medical model, medical practitioner, academic medicine 2002, role primary care, mundinger academic medicine, nurse practitioner role,