Critical Thinking - Licensed Care Providers Health, Medicine Essay

Licensed Care Providers
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Licensed care providers
Non-physician providers (NPPs) are critical in healthcare institutions because they complement the care of physicians. They include psychologists, nurse practitioners, chiropractors, occupational therapists, social workers, physician assistants, and midwives. They are instrumental in reducing physician burnout in group practice. This paper takes a look at the merits and demerits of non-physician providers and then assesses their impact in health settings.
Non-physician providers offer the following benefits. First, they help physicians focus on more severe patient issues. More time can be allocated for patients with complex conditions. Physicians don't have to spend too much time on administrative work at their clinical practice expense. The NPPs can handle non-critical patient issues such as tests or therapies without the physician’s supervision. Second, NPPs boost patient satisfaction in health settings. Studies show that NPPs boost patient care as they can attend to all of their appointments (Boucher, 2015). They also give patients more time to listen and understand their issues.
Third, NPPs help care providers to manage a higher volume of patients daily. This is because they can offer patient care services, which increases access to care in hospitals. Forth, NPPs enable health providers to deal with physician shortages. Many hospitals suffer from an acute shortage of physicians due to the high demand (Boucher, 2015). By hiring NPPs, hospitals can solve this problem by increasing healthcare professionals' supply in the group practice.
Non-physician providers pose some challenges to health institutions. They may not have the clinical capacity to handle patient care services compared to physicians. This means they cannot perform the required tasks according to expectations. NPPs also need regular supervision from physicians since they can’t work independently without their input (Lovink et al., 2017). Physicians will need to assume superv...