Nurse Practitioner is still an informal title (sighs heavily). The course
was set up very carefully with competencies etc so that the people coming
through the course would be able to function autonomously in primary care.
The original RCN course was for Primary Care and on qualifying I titled
myself Nurse Practitioner in Primary Health Care.
And since then - 1992 - we have tried to get the various tools to do the
job, sick certs, ordering investigations, prescribing etc and to get our
registering body to record the qualification and protect the title.
About the same time lots of clinical nurse specialists were evolving and A&E
nurses were developing more advanced roles and on reading the description of
the role many experienced nurses felt they fulfilled the criteria and could
be called Nurse Practitioner.
We have kept on at the Nursing Midwifery Council and the UKCC that was the
organisation in its previous life. We took part in a Higher Level of
Practice Pilot run by the UKCC to check out if we could prove/demonstrate
that we were working at a higher more advanced level than a registered
nurse. We sailed through that but when the UKCC became the NMC all the
evidence was "filed" somewhere. We finally got the NMC to recognise that
there are nurses working at an Advanced level, they agreed there was a need
to record these nurses and there has been further work done to establish the
competencies that nurses will have to "meet" to be recorded. Educational
establishments have got together to make sure that their courses will
prepare nurses to meet those competencies.
Currently the hold up is the Privy Council. They have been sitting on this
one for fifteen months, probably waiting for information on other issues
that will impact on the register.
Meanwhile the public, employers and the Nurse Practitioners themselves have
no protection!
We also did lots of international work to get a recognised definition and
title. Some difficulty because in other countries they wanted to use
Advanced Practice Nurse, but because we have Practice Nurses in the UK it
caused confusion. The NMC decided on Advanced Nurse Practitioner.
Some of us old fossils may not meet the criteria to get recorded on the NMC
register. The original course was at diploma level. We will just end up in
the history of NPs as the ones who just would not give up!
So if any of you have any influence please use it! We need to have a
register/record of nurses qualified/competent/working in advanced roles and
using the designated title! The NMC are ready to do this - we just need the
Privy Council to agree.
Sorry Fay for such a long answer but you did ask!
Cherry
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