Nurse Practitioners Pros And Cons

The debate regarding nurse practitioners (NPs), their scope of practice, and whether or not they should have full practice authority has become increasingly controversial over the last several years. Nurse practitioner’s prescriptive authority and whether or not they should be allowed to prescribe any scheduled drugs is a big part of this controversy. There are arguments made by those for and against this, offering up a number of pros and cons for the issue. This post will focus on the cons and some of the arguments of those that are anti-NP prescribing.
According to Iglehart (2013), the American Medical Academy (AMA) opposes full practice and prescriptive authority of NPs and believes medicine should be organized with an upper echelon system.