Edie Featured in Article Published by U.S. News & World Report
Alison Edie, assistant professor, was recently featured in an article entitled "The Best Medical Jobs That Don't Require Medical School" published by U.S. News & World Report.
Nurse practitioners and physicians share similar duties and levels of authority. In many states, members of both groups can work autonomously, make diagnoses and prescribe medicine.
But as their titles suggest, nurse practitioners remain true to the tenets of nursing philosophy, coupling evidence-based practices with special attention to each patient's familial, financial and cultural circumstances.
"We come at care of people in a more holistic way," says Alison Edie, assistant professor in the school of nursing at Duke University. "Being able to sit down with a patient or the mother of a child and come up with a plan of care that includes them in the decision-making, that's very satisfying."
Like doctors, nurse practitioners specialize in graduate school in areas such as primary, family or acute care.
"As you enter the nurse practitioner field, you do need to decide what population and setting you want to practice in," Edie says.
They may practice among populations whose patients don't have adequate health care resources.
"The real challenges are in meeting those same needs in an environment where access is limited," Edie says. "Maybe the best drug isn't affordable to this patient, or maybe there are challenges for someone to get diagnostic testing done."