Also, there's also a lot of resistance (and prejudice) in going from blue-collar to pink-collar, partly because care and health services are seem as feminine jobs(except doctors, of course).
Jobs come with a lot of baggage. Could I make a good doctor in an abstract sense? Hell yes, I thrive at diagnosing complicated technical systems under pressure working closely with people. However I am sensitive to lack of sleep and when I inevitably kill someone during my training hazing when you have to work 36 straight hours without sleep, I'd... react rather poorly to having killed them over basically being too much of a coward to say F that hazing tradition. So I can't become a doctor. The problem would be the hazing but the firing paperwork would be some BS like culture fit, and I'm smart enough to predict the whole thing so I'm not even gonna try. A pity, I'd be a hell of a good doc.
Likewise we've loaded the psychology of nursing with certain baggage that only a fraction of the population is going to tolerate. The reason the supply of nurses is limited is not because we lack for the technical ability to learn to give sponge baths or ability to follow surgeons orders to assist them. I think we pretty much have all the people nursing who can fit the precise psychological cookie cutter of stereotypical nurse and folks who don't fit that cutter will have their money taken in classrooms but they'll get weeded out of the field. Leading to "how we gonna retrain these excess unemployable nurses?" and maybe we'll torture them with some other field requiring a unique unusual personality, like psychologist or chef, and when they fail that, we'll collect tuition retraining all of them to be ...
We're only allowed culturally to talk about changing employees never changing the employer or the workplace itself. Which is unfortunately the thing most needing changing now.
So its a forbidden thought to consider that the problem is we need to accept drill sgt like nurses and construction dude like nurses not just nurse like nurses. Or its a forbidden thought that I could become an ER doc without the required lack of sleep hazing. But if you want to actually fix broken systems sometimes you need to at least think about forbidden thoughts.
A world where its safe to question why a nurse can't tell a patient to F themselves when they need to be told to F themselves or where its safe to question why a new doc needs to go thru hazing at the cost of patient lives is a better world. Its not exclusively about convincing students to enter fields where everyone knows they're not gonna fit and then shrugging shoulders when they inevitably don't fit and wash out. Sometimes fields suck and need fixing.
The nursing profession is extraordinarily important, and we underutilize it in this country. Most of us should be talking to "nurses" much more frequently than we do, and much more often than we talk to doctors.
[0] Also known as "physician assistant", which is a terrible name when making a case for autonomy...
The market as a whole needs to come to the understanding that we (a) need a kind of "doctor-lite" for people to go see, and (b) that we have them already: we call them nurses, but should call them something else.
Not many people feel they can switch careers in mid-life to become a doctor. But people routinely go to nursing school for a career switch. It would be good if more people did this, specifically to get NP status.
They have similar education requirements to a nurse and perform (in practice) similar functions.
In a minority of jurisdictions in the US, NPs can practice without the supervision of a physician, whereas PAs, in all jurisdictions, must be in a relationship with a supervising physician. But both PAs and NPs, generally, can see patients and prescribe medications, within state-specified limits, without interacting with a physician in the course of performing that function.
I don't think "assisting doctors" is actually what most nurses do; most nurses work under the clinical supervision of a physician (and that's also true of NPs in a majority of US jurisdictions; there are 20 states where they have "full practice authority".)
In any case, since NPs are RNs with additional qualifications (they are actually a name for some specialities of advance practice registered nurses), it makes sense that they are called nurses.
> Not many people feel they can switch careers in mid-life to become a doctor. But people routinely go to nursing school for a career switch. It would be good if more people did this, specifically to get NP status.
NP status (or APRN more generally, regardless of specialty) takes substantially more education than RN, and a lot of the people who go back to school for nursing don't even get to the RN level, just LVN/LPN. Changing the name isn't going to change that.
Anyway, the non-nurse physician-lite you are talking about isn't the NP, it's the Physician Assistant. While the scope of practice is somewhat similar, the latter is abbreviated training of the type provided to physicians, the latter is advanced training of the type provided to nurses; they are different models. An NP or other APRN is a nurse with advanced training and certification which allows them to do some things without supervision of a physician, a physician assistant is a reduced-qualification physician with a correspondingly narrowed scope of practice. You seem to be interested in the latter, but think that the former is the same thing with a poorly chosen name rather than a distinct and different thing with some overlap in role.
There is no reason someone needs to spend $200,000 and 13 years of his life to say "Oh you're feeling depressed how about an SSRI? Or oh your cholesterol levels are high, how about some Lipitor?"
Nursing has its own tradition and model of education , training, and care that is quite distinct from that of medicine. Nurses aren't medical associates. (And there already is a profession called, depending on jurisdiction, physician associate or physician assistant -- which follows the medical rather than nursing model -- which would be confusing if nurses were renamed medical associates.)
And, given the idea that nurses are increasingly the dominant point of contact, it would make more sense (were we to decide to erase the distinction) to rename physicians "nursing supervisors" rather than the other way around. Of course, confusion with names of existing roles would again be a problem.