CONTEXT Nurse practitioners increasingly provide primary care in a variety of settings. Little is known about how resource utilization for patients assigned to nurse practitioners compares with that for patients assigned to physicians. OBJECTIVE To compare health care resource utilization for adult patients assigned to a nurse practitioner with that for patients assigned to a resident or atte...

introduction: evaluation of nurse-patient communication skills have been strongly emphasized in order to ensure the possibility of effective communication as well as assessment of the effect of communication skills training programs. reaching this goal requires the use of standard instruments which is based on the native culture of the target group. due to the absence of native instruments in t...

Impending physician shortages in the United States will necessitate greater reliance on physician assistants and nurse practitioners, particularly in primary care. But how willing are Americans to accept that change? This study examines provider preferences from patients' perspective, using data from the Association of American Medical Colleges' Consumer Survey. We found that about half of the ...

OBJECTIVE To compare tuberculosis skin test (TST) reading rates between children whose tests were read by school nurses following specific requests by physicians and those who relied on their parents to get their tests read, either at school or at the physician's office. DESIGN A randomized controlled trial. SETTING An urban hospital-based pediatric practice. PARTICIPANTS Healthy low-inco...

BACKGROUND After-hours out-of-hospital phone consultations require physicians to make decisions based on information provided by a nurse over the phone. METHODS We conducted a simulation study to evaluate physicians' actions following communication of key information. 22 nurses were asked to call physicians with six cases based on the six most common reasons for after-hours phone calls. We ev...

OBJECTIVES To determine whether satisfaction of on-site nurses with after-hours telephone communication with off-site physicians improved in one long-term care (LTC) facility after a nurse-oriented intervention. DESIGN Longitudinal quality improvement study. SETTING Extended Care and Rehabilitation Center (ECRC), Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center. PARTICIPANTS Eighteen registered nur...