Blog
Jul 28, 2010
On Wednesday, July 28, CCNA's Coalition members came together to discuss health care and the future of nursing from the consumer, business, and payer and provider perspectives. John Rother, AARP Executive Vice President for Policy and Strategy, spoke to the group on "where we need to go in health care delivery—and why that will require a much larger role for the nursing profession.”
According to Rother, the success of health reform depends on innovations in delivery that increase efficiency while maintaining quality, and nurses should play a major role in making health care reform work for patients, for providers, and for payers. He noted that the new health care law takes some important steps in the right direction, "but it doesn’t go far enough." Read the entire speech here.
John Rother is AARP Executive Vice President for Policy & Strategy.
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Jul 12, 2010
With Susan Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Initiative on the Future of Nursing, at the Institute of Medicine.
As senior advisor for nursing for the nation's largest health care philanthropy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Susan B. Hassmiller has had nursing in her blood from an early age. From candy striper to nurse's aide to nurse to the director of the RWJF Initiative on the Future of Nursing, at the Institute of Medicine, Hassmiller is spending her summer vacation in Europe, retracing the steps of the legendary Florence Nightingale. In this and upcoming posts in the American Journal of Nursing's Off the Charts blog, Hassmiller reports on her inspiring trip to London, at Embley Park and Istanbul, Turkey and what it means to her work today. Below is an excerpt from Sue's first post.
Eighteen years old and ‘hot to trot.’ That’s what I thought I was. Having just been admitted into nursing school, I was set to change the world…one patient at a time. They tried to teach me about Florence Nightingale, but she was someone from the past…not likely to help me learn to start IVs, put in catheters, or run ventilators. If there were iPods back then, I would have used mine to avoid lessons about how Florence Nightingale changed the face of nursing forever. Read the full post here.
Update: Sue Hassmiller answers six questions about her trip for RWJF's Sharing Nursing's Knowledge (August 2010).
Jul 9, 2010
By Phil Zarlengo, AARP Board Chair
Last month in Providence, RI, I joined more than 80 business, community and health care leaders representing health systems, community health organizations, government agencies, non-profits and nursing groups to discuss the role that nurses should have in the leadership of these organizations. While no one doubts the important role that nurses play in patient care, this distinctive meeting focused on leveraging the untapped value of nurses as leaders in the boardroom.
AARP was early to recognize how much our members and the public have to gain from having nurses on the association’s board of directors. In the years that I have been on the board, I have had the privilege of working with many of them.
Surrounded by their accomplishments, it’s difficult for me to grasp some of the results of a Gallup/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation poll of health care leaders. Those leaders put nurses at the bottom of the list of people who are going to influence health reform over the next five to ten years. More than two-thirds of them said that a major barrier to greater influence in health care leadership is that nurses are not perceived to be important health care decision makers compared to physicians.
These perceptions are overdue for a change. This plague of low expectations makes no sense when it comes to nurses. Health care governance, for example, needs directors and trustees who understand health care delivery. More than that, however, boards of governance also need leadership with firsthand, in-depth knowledge of complex organizations and how best to navigate the relationships within them. Nurse leaders have that knowledge, along with strong competencies in management, communications and leadership.
I’ve heard nursing compared to “running a bunch of small businesses all over the place.”
Those sound like board of directors skills to me.
In addition, when nurses speak, they are believed. Theirs is a trusted and credible voice. Doctors and nurses are the information sources about health and health care in whom opinion leaders have a great deal of confidence. And those opinion leaders share with me a great desire to see nurses’ influence and leadership increase. It’s hard to imagine a more valuable contribution to the success of health care reform than elevating the influence of nurses. I look forward to it!
To learn more about CCNA’s Nurses on Boards project, visit http://championnursing.org/content/nurses-boards.
Jul 6, 2010
By Tine Hansen-Turton, MGA, JD, Chief Executive Officer and Ann Ritter, JD, Director, Health Center Development & Policy, National Nursing Centers Consortium
The passage of the Affordable Care Act means that more than 30 million additional Americans will have health insurance by the year 2014. Can our primary care system handle the demand?
In Massachusetts, passage of a universal insurance plan in 2006 completely overwhelmed the Commonwealth’s existing supply of primary care physicians, and the effects are still being felt. In 2009, only 44% of internists in Massachusetts were accepting new patients. The average wait time for a new patient to get an appointment was 44 days.
Nurse practitioners can provide care that is similar in scope to a primary care physician in all 50 states. Health care innovators have capitalized on nurse practitioners’ ability to provide high-quality care in independent settings such as convenient care clinics (also known as retail-based clinics) and nonprofit nurse-managed health clinics that serve vulnerable patients. Nurse practitioners in these settings have already served over 20 million people in the U.S., and they have the capacity to reach millions more.
How can nurse-led health clinics reach their full potential? A few common-sense policy reforms could go a long way towards increasing access to primary care for all Americans.
First, insurance companies should do a better job connecting their enrollees to nurse practitioners. We conducted a national survey of insurance companies last year and found that nearly half of all major insurers in the U.S. do not credential or reimburse nurse practitioners as primary care providers.
This means that patients who want to see a nurse practitioner for primary care don’t have the flexibility to do so. It also means that many patients whose needs could be addressed in a cost-effective way by nurse practitioners have to wait weeks or months for an appointment with a physician.
Many of the insurers who refuse to recognize nurse practitioners as primary care providers are Medicare and Medicaid insurers. At the same time, nurse-led practices have been excluded from “medical home” projects designed to improve health care quality for seniors and other patients. Nurse practitioners are especially well-suited to provide affordable primary care to patients with chronic conditions. At a time when everyone is looking for better ways to control health care costs, we should make it easier for people with Medicare and Medicaid to choose a nurse practitioner as their primary care provider.
