Quality of Diabetes Care in Family Medicine Practices: Influence of Nurse-Practitioners and Physician’s Assistants
Ann Fam Med Ohman-Strickland et al.
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The Article in Brief
Quality of Diabetes Care in Family Medicine Practices: Influence of Nurse-Practitioners and Physician's Assistants
Pamela A. Ohman-Strickland, PhD
, and colleagues
Background Growing numbers of nurse-practitioners (NPs) and physician?s assistants (PAs) are providing care in primary care practices. This study examines the effect of NPs and PAs on the quality of care delivered in the primary care setting. In particular, the study focuses on the care of diabetes patients.
What This Study Found Family medicine practices with NPs perform better at providing some types of diabetes care (primarily monitoring tests) than practices with doctors only, and they perform especially better than practices using physician?s assistants.
Implications
- The reasons for these results are not yet clear. Additional research needs to explore whether the results are due to NPs and PAs or the practices that hire them.
- Future research should also aim to find the best roles for different clinicians working in teams, so that they can have the greatest impact on patient care.
