Description
Part 1I believe education, advocacy, and awareness can promote improved legislation on the state and national level. Public education can lead to change and persuade community support for nurse practitioners. Community involvement can initiate awareness at the state level and generate policy changes that support NPs that can result into initiating change on the national level. Competition influences policy change by electing appropriate candidates and parties that support nursing legislation and change. Lobbying, building alliances within the community, campaigning, negotiating with policy makers at the state and national level can be influential for systemic policy changes within healthcare and NP practice. Ideally, the legislative and executive branches can work together by initiating and passing bills and signing new bills into law that will enable policy changes. They can work together to veto bills that are ineffective and impeding NPs from productively practicing effective healthcare and reform in various populations across the continuum (Kleinpell R., Myers CR., Schorn MN., 2023.)Part 2Being an Advanced-practice registered nurse(APRN) can be very beneficial in many different settings of patient care, however it is still considered a restricted role since there are various barriers to this profession. According to a national survey done, one of the major barriers include administrative and licensure issues including the structured transition to work in a practice requiring physician oversight, limitations of APRNs being able to qualify patients for certain Medicaid programs because of licensure, and not being able to work in certain states (Schorn et al., 2022). The scope of practice can vary from state to state and practitioners have to work within the state’s policies and guidelines. In New Jersey, practitioners have to have a joint collaboration with a physician, and this can impede their independency and restrict a patient’s access to care. Because APRNs have advanced training and education, healthcare settings involving APRNs have had positive impact on wait times, improved quality of care and increased patient satisfaction (Boman et al, 2020). Some practices within an APRN’s scope is doing initial, ongoing and comprehensive care for the patient but there has to be a contract in place with a physician. Furthermore, there are practice restrictions for APRNs in their ability to provide care for patients recovering from opioid addictions due to the barriers in prescriptive authority. In most restrictive states, APRNs are required to maintain a written collaborative practice agreement with a physician and are most often denied prescriptive authority and New Jersey is considered a restricted state (Germack, 2021).
