Nurse Practitioners: a High Quality Fix for Primary Care Shortage - Elder Branch

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the United States currently has a shortage of 9,000 primary care physicians. With the expansion of insurance coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, that figure is expected to grow to 65,800 by 2025. The situation is similarly bleak for seniors seeking specialized geriatric care, with a shortage of 10,100 geriatricians today; a figure that will grow as 10,000 baby boomers hit retirement age per day between now and 2030.

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Most recently, in a study led by Dr. David Reuben of UCLA published in The Journal of The American Geriatrics Society, the authors found that nurse practitioners working with primary care physicians in a community-based primary care setting was associated with better quality of care for geriatric conditions. This “co-management” of patients is, in fact, often recommended by researchers as the ideal primary care offering as patients are able to tap into the areas of expertise of NPs and physicians. According to Margaret Dean, a geriatric nurse practitioner, faculty associate in geriatrics at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Nursing at Amarillo, and a fellow in the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, NPs “work hand-in-hand with primary care physicians. I ask them questions about things they are experts in and they come to me to ask me questions about things I am an expert in.”

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