A the Nurse Practitioner and the Comprehensive Care Exam
I do not think Nurse Practitioners should be required to take a comprehensive care exam. Nurse practitioners already belong to professional practice organizations and they are already required to acquire continuing education credits in order to be re-certified every 5 years. Therefore I would argue that, besides gaining new education and skills from their daily work and work environments; they already have enough going on to ensure their knowledge stays current without the need to add an extra exam to their busy schedules. Further, and this is probably my most poignant argument on this topic, there are no studies to my knowledge, that have been conducted showing the benefits of continuing comprehensive care exam testing beyond the initial certification exam; and whether or not it correlates to greater clinical proficiency, and more importantly, better patient outcomes.
Recently we have seen other organizations such as The National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants (NCCPA) lengthen or extend the time required between recertification exams from 5 years to 10 years (NPs & PAs, 2012). This change is significant because the NCCPA did not just extend the time by one or two years, they essentially doubled it. The change is also significant because the number of continuing medical education credits (CME) required for certification will remain the same even though the certification period has been doubled. One could argue that this signals that they are actually slowly moving away from continual testing, and make a bold prediction that one day, they will do away with testing altogether. So why would Nurse Practitioner certification bodies start moving towards incorporating this type of testing into their profession when they already have the aforementioned safeguards to ensure that practitioners’ knowledge and skills stay current over time?
Adding another test would also add to the financial burden of having to keep up with professional organization
Recently we have seen other organizations such as The National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants (NCCPA) lengthen or extend the time required between recertification exams from 5 years to 10 years (NPs & PAs, 2012). This change is significant because the NCCPA did not just extend the time by one or two years, they essentially doubled it. The change is also significant because the number of continuing medical education credits (CME) required for certification will remain the same even though the certification period has been doubled. One could argue that this signals that they are actually slowly moving away from continual testing, and make a bold prediction that one day, they will do away with testing altogether. So why would Nurse Practitioner certification bodies start moving towards incorporating this type of testing into their profession when they already have the aforementioned safeguards to ensure that practitioners’ knowledge and skills stay current over time?
Adding another test would also add to the financial burden of having to keep up with professional organization