Article 56. Innovation in Health Care Nurses Become Doctors
There are lots of new innovations occurring every day in health care but the acceptance and implementation sometimes takes years. Most of the time acceptance of new ways of doing things is hindered by lack of funding but human habit and established procedures also contribute and are difficult to overcome.
One of the major problems in health care is the lack of doctors especially in small towns. The lure of high incomes and the big cities has left many small towns without doctors. Years ago doctors would diagnose patients using his best educated guess and proscribed treatment for what he thought would cure the patient. The patients never questioned the opinion of the doctor and whether they lived or died there was nothing else that could be done. A second given was that doctors in the past were always men and nurses were always women. When I was a boy that is how you knew which was the doctor and which was the nurse. This aura and stigma about what a doctor is still exists with us today. But times have changed doctors have many ways of testing to determine a correct diagnosis. Medical advice and prescription drug definitions are available to everyone on the Internet. Nurses today are many times more knowledgeable than doctors were when I was a boy.
The bottom line is to let experienced Nurses by taking a special state board examination become General Practitioner Doctors. I can hear the bloody scream from the American Medical Association (AMA) already. If in fact you had to wait for the approval of the AMA it would never happen in our lifetime. They have the duty to protect the medical profession but this also means protecting the income of doctors. If the AMA will not approve this change then it must be done by fiat. Get the approval of the nursing profession and just do it. The need is too great to wait for AMA approval.
There is another related problem there is also a shortage of nurses. But when you put these two problems together a shortage of doctors and a shortage nurses the solution isn’t obvious and here is why. There is high dropout rate for trained nurses over the years they burnout from shift work and in just a few years they reach the top of their pay grade. In short though highly trained there is nowhere to go in the nursing profession. If nurses especially supervision nurses with at least ten years of experience could take a board examination and become a doctor the glass ceiling would be broken. More nurses will enter the profession and stay in the profession longer if there is the possibility of becoming a doctor. You can also make the condition that nurses who become doctors must practice in a small town for five years before final approval and permanent status as a doctor.
