Doctors are not the only ones who can diagnose an illness or write a prescription.

In British Columbia, there are more than 500 active job postings for family doctors and so few GPs are accepting new patients that an online database to find a family doctor has been discontinued.

Doctors are not the only ones who are able to diagnose an illness, write prescriptions or refer a patient to a specialist — nurse practitioners can, too.

Lorine Scott graduated from one of the University of Victoria's first classes of nurse practitioners (NPs) in 2005 and is now executive director of the B.C. Nurse Practitioner Association.

She says utilizing NPs more could help with the doctor shortage by easing some of the pressure on family doctors.  

Click here to read the full article on the CBC 

The BC Nurse Practitioner Association (BCNPA) released a report last year entitled "Primary Care Transformation in British Columbia: A New Model to Integrate Nurse Practitioners". Here's an article written by the Canadian Healthcare Network after they interviewed the BCNPA at an annual health policy conference.

Click here to read the article

The British Columbia Nurse Practitioner Association (BCNPA) wrote and released a paper in November 2016 around sustainable funding models for NPs in BC.  This paper has been distributed provincially and nationally to a wide group of stakeholders and they have received favourable review and feedback from many, including the Canadian Nurses Association, the BC Chief Nursing Officers, and the provincial and federal Ministries of Health.

The paper was recently presented by one of the co-authors Dr. Natasha Prodan-Bhalla, at the UBC Centre for Health Services and Policy Research Conference in Vancouver.  It was well-received there with keen interest from physicians who are interested in working with interprofessional teams in multi-disciplinary settings but are hampered by the limitations of their own current funding models.  Sustainable funding for new NP roles was seen as a pressing need by those in attendance.

Click here to read the paper

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This aricle was provided by Mary Ann Denton and orginally publishied in the Saskatchewan Polytechnic School of Nursing Fall 2014 Newsletter.

Mary Ann Denton RN(NP) and member of SANP, was featured in the Saskatchewan Polytechnic School of Nursing Fall Newsletter. To read more about Mary Ann click here