A national survey of PICU nurse practitioners--opportunities to standardize practices and optimize service delivery.

1 Nurse practitioners (NPs) have been caring for children since L.C. Ford and H.K. Silver pioneered the concept in the 1960s, and now, NPs also care for children in subspecialty, acute, and critical care (Silver, Ford, & Day, 1968). Reductions in resident duty hours in 2003 and 2011 (Schwartz et al., 2011) coupled with the primary care focus of the pediatric resident curriculum (Guralnick et al., 2010) have resulted in a dearth of pro viders to deliver evidence-based care for the critically ill child. While NPs have served in PICUs for years (Gaedeke & Blount, 1995; Martin, 1999; Teicher, Crawford, Williams, Nelson, & Andrews, 2001), many new programs have been implemented in the last decade to fill these gaps. Verger, Marcoux, Madden, and Bojko (2005) first identified variability in PICU-NP job structure, management and scope of practice. The National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions (NACHRI) PICU FOCUS Group noted this variability and created an updated survey to describe the current scope of practice and professional facets of PICU NPs.