¶ … Quality of Care Provided by Nurse Practitioners
Cost and quality of healthcare access are two inter-related concepts that are central to the healthcare debate in the United States of America. The study will compare the effectiveness of quality and costs between NP and physicians. To achieve this purpose, the study will be guided y the following research questions; how does the cost of care provided by nurse practitioners compare to that of physicians: and how is the quality of care provided by nurse practitioners? The Jean Watson's Theory of Human Caring is adopted for this study. The study will be conducted in five different hospitals that have health services being provided by both NP and physicians. Study participants will be selected from hospital databases with the help of hospital staff to establish which patients will be more suited for the study. Research questionnaires will be used for data collections. The data collected will be analyzed through statistical program (SPSS, 2015 version) and descriptive analysis.
Purpose of Study
Cost and quality of healthcare access are two inter-related concepts that are central to the healthcare debate in the United States of America (Stanik-Hutt et al., 2013). To contribute to this debate, this study narrows down to the costs and quality of care delivered by nursing practitioners (NP). In particular, the study will compare the effectiveness of quality and costs between NP and physicians. To achieve this purpose, the study will be guided y the following research questions.
Research Questions
Two research questions have been set towards realization of the study purpose;
i. How does the cost of care provided by nurse practitioners compare to that of physicians?
ii. How is the quality of care provided by nurse practitioners?
Literature Review
According to Fletcher, Copeland and Lowery (2011), nursing practitioners can provide primary care that is underutilized within the healthcare environment. By acquiring skills in patient care management and physical assessment, NP can become primary care providers delivering services such as diagnosing, ambulatory care settings and providing treatments for a variety of health problems. Based on this skill set, NPs are expected to provide services that are less costly. Fletcher et al. (2011) reveals that the number of Veterans who seek for the primary healthcare services from nursing practitioners since 1996 has increased by more than 200%, which is attributed to high quality and cost-effective services.
Litaker, Mion and Planavsky (2003), demonstrate that there are modest incremental costs for a complementary team approach for the management of chronic disease. The authors reveal that intervention of NPs and medical practitioners increases HDL-c prevalence by 7%, however, HbA1c for diabetes patients reduces from 7.9% to 7.0%. The microvascular complications were reduced by 25% and a reduction of 16% for non-fatal, fatal sudden death and
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