The Entry into Practice for the Family Nurse Practitioner Essay

The Entry into Practice for the Family Nurse Practitioner - Essay Example This facility is in a rural medically-underserved area where the clinic is part of the hospital system – but is not a hospital in the strictest sense. The clinic, however, shares the tax ID number with the hospital. It is also a provider-based health clinic (more on family practice and services). It is well-funded and is qualified under health provider shortage and medically-underserved categorization. In this sense, it is qualified to use either category, depending on need and on advantages. It is a small community of fewer than 20,000 inhabitants but it would likely serve more than one county or community. This type of town is one where everyone would most likely know each other. All the providers would have an LVN and the clinic has a clinic manager who would be acting as a liaison between the clinic and the hospital CEO; this manager would also be an intake coordinator; he would also coordinate staff for rescheduling, for billing, and for referrals. Pros and cons of workin g in identified arrangement One of the advantages of working in the identified arrangement are that the provider would be able to get to know his patients and the circumstances surrounding his patients’ lives. Such an arrangement helps the provider administer the best type of care for his patients. Assessing the patient within his home environment is one of the ways for a provider to reach maximum efficacy (Hunt, 2008). The provider would not have much difficulty in evaluating his patients in their home setting because the community is small. Moreover, the provider would already know where the available resources are and know who would likely have access to such resources (Buppert, 2007). For the more specialized needs of the community, the clinic schedules specialists to visit at different times each month in order to reduce the need for patients having to travel to distant places to seek medical care. In the end, this practice helps ensure continuity of care for the patient s. Continuity of care is an important aspect of healthcare because it helps ensure that the patient would be fully monitored throughout his illness and would be able to eventually gain full recovery (Haggerty, et.al., 2008). Disadvantages are however also apparent in this set-up. For one, not many people would prefer living in medically-underserved areas because of the difficulty in accessing adequate and quality medical care (Shi and Singh, 2008). The more technical and higher level of services would be limited in this area. I noted however that the clinic where I precept conducts many high-level services because the health professionals in the clinic are very skilled. Throughout their years of practice in the rural setting, they have picked up and mastered various skills. They have encountered various patients and have come up with different ways to treat them or to stabilize them long enough to reach the next referral hospital. Even with the disadvantages which practitioners have encountered in the rural practice, the clinic has managed to work around its challenges and provide the best quality of services it can provide. It is important to note also that there are not as many positions for practitioners in the rural setting; the pay scale is lower than the average pay. The cost of services is however also lower than the cost of services appear in the urban setting.