Infographic Illustrating Nurse Practitioners Struggle With COVID-19
COVID-19 has been nothing short of hell for nurse practitioners (NP). Their resources have been dwindling and the continuous surge of infected patients has been simply too overwhelming to handle. Despite going through all these challenges their jobs are not as secure as they should be.
A recent survey conducted by the American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP), a second one of this nature has found out that while there are some lingering challenges, it cannot be denied that the Nurse Practitioners have made significant progress in combating COVID-19 effectively. The survey was also meant to determine what needs to be done to ensure that the efforts of the NP are not in vain and that these efforts can truly stem the tide of the pandemic in communities nationwide.
The importance of NP was perhaps best described by David Hebert, JD, Chief Executive Officer of AANP, “NPs continue to demonstrate their outstanding clinical expertise and unwavering commitment to patients combatting COVID-19 — from primary care to acute health care settings. Not only are NPs making significant progress in readying their practice environments to safely establish a new normal for COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patient care, they are innovating the future of health and laying the groundwork for a better, more resilient health care system of the future”
The survey also aims to understand how COVID-19 is affecting the clinical practice of NPs across settings, specialties, and geographic location. The survey was quickly deployed to capture insights into the NP response to the pandemic, understand challenges facing the profession and identify those policies and practices that can best support the needs of health care providers treating patients impacted by COVID-19. This survey was made possible by 4038 association respondents self-identified as working across a variety of specialty, acute and primary care work settings, including office-based group practices, hospital inpatient units and outpatient clinics, federally qualified health centers, urgent care centers and VA facilities.
Some of the lingering challenges that are faced by the NP are:
- Increasing number of infected NPs has increased 3 folds since the initial days of the pandemic
- Availability if testing sites and testing kits is perhaps the largest of barriers faced by NPs
- Delay of test results is also a huge obstacle, delays can be anywhere from a span of 7 days to 20 days and in the meantime, control measures that need to be applied incase of positive is delayed, leading to more infections and in dire cases death.
AANP President Sophia L. Thomas illustrated this need of support from the community inorder to overcome this pandemic, “Governors and state elected officials must support our ability to treat patients in more than 1 billion patient visits each year by immediately acting to enable NPs to practice to the top of their education and clinical training. The practice barriers of the past have no place in our current crisis or in the future of healthcare”
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