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Nurse Practitioners as Primary Care Providers Essay

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Nurse Practitioners as Primary Care Providers
Every individual in the world deserves to enjoy health and wellness. Maintaining or achieving proper health needs enables individuals to be productive at work and leisure. Traditionally, many people have had barriers obtaining adequate healthcare due to economic constraints or personal inconveniences. Despite impressive technological advances in medicine, the challenge of delivering quality healthcare to the Americans continues to be debated amongst the nation’s political and healthcare leaders. The aging baby-boomers and the increased number of uninsured people add to the equation of population growth which results in limited access to primary healthcare for the entire public. On the …show more content…

Often times, the retail clinics are located near the patients’ homes and offer unconventional office hours. Operating every day of the week, patients are usually seen as walk-ins with minimal wait times. Prescriptions can also be immediately filled while they shop for grocery or personal care items in the drug store. Moreover, the cost for the efficient quality care is relatively small compared to that of visiting primary care physicians’ practices. A usual visit to the retail clinic can run between forty to seventy dollars depending on the depth of the service. Convenience care clinics that are purposely designed to be housed in retail stores with high traffic volume have existed to accommodate the public’s quest for convenience and wellness (Hansen-Turton et al., n.d.).
Although the retail clinics are fairly a new concept, the family nurse practitioners strictly adhere to the profession’s scope of practice and established protocols set forth in each retail company. The scope of practice for nurse practitioners however differs from state to state. This lack of consistency creates a hindrance to the fullest potential that the NPs can practice in certain states. Regardless, all NPs in every state are eligible for direct Medicaid reimbursement and Medicare Part B services according to the 1997 Balanced Budget Act (Hansen-Turton et al., n.d.). With or without the physician’s oversight, the FNPs practice safe care within their advanced practice

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