The Nurse Practitioner’s Place

A family nurse practitioner often sees complicated patients. There are two types of patients on a daily basis. The first is the younger patient who is usually seen for sick visits such as sore throat, ear infection, cough, and urinary tract symptoms. The other type is more complicated and has many morbidities such as diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipids, and COPD, usually in a combination of them. This patient is often labeled as noncompliant.

It is also a battle trying to obtain old records to see what testing has already been done or if there are any conditions that they forgot to tell me about. Sometimes they have been treated for a condition that they weren’t even aware of. Imagine that!

Education is one of the things that Nurse Practitioners do best. My patients have often told me that they learned more in 15 minutes than they have been taught in several years. It’s very important to explain disease processes in easy to understand terms. Too often we forget to “come down to the laymen’s level.” Too much information at one sitting can be too much to focus on and the patient will tune you out. Consider bringing them into the office for separate teaching visits. I am currently working on finding easy to understand patient education handouts.