Personally, I'll take the 60 year old NP over the 30 year old doctor 95%+ of the time.
The NP has seen more and been around the block. The doctor still is a baby in medicine.
The NP has seen more and been around the block. The doctor still is a baby in medicine.
They don't have a medical education. They have a nursing education. They are different things. A good doctor relies on experienced nurses for what they are good at - which is recognizing someone who's in trouble, because they have spent a lot more hours at the bedside than we have and have superb spidey senses. If a nurse asks me to look at a patient, I will. If it's an experienced nurse, I'll come running.
The best friend to have is an OR nurse. She knows which doctor is on cocaine, who cannot stop shaking when handling the scalpel, who cannot bother with a prep checklist before a surgery.
If you are doing surgery for a loved one, consult an OR nurse. They will tell you what's up.
Best of all, nurses all talk to each other, so chances are someone in their group will know that Dr. Charming over at hospital X is nicknamed The Undertaker by in-the-know staff...
I've also seen doctors where their social skills honestly impaired them from getting through to people and thus getting the needed outcomes.
Also... Your "roadkill" doc may do well with me. Smooth talkers always seem to come up short for me.
That said, especially in primary care, give me an NP over a PA anytime. Primary care is a numbers game and NPs roll the dice better. Specialty PAs are great; I learned some of my best ortho from ortho PAs. But generalist PAs scare me and have been the source of some horrific consults in the past.
One (not all) aspects of the NP program was similar to your comment, building off career and professional experience, and using that as one basis for knowledge.
These programs are not even giving you the RN -student- nursing experience (let alone post graduation), they're skipping that entirely.
Looking online:
"Become an NP in 20 months". "NP in 27 months".
From HIGH SCHOOL.
In EMS, there is a push to make paramedicine at least an associates, if not a bachelors degree (there are programs with all three, certificate, associate, bachelors).
Paramedics are the advanced version of when you call 911. The invasive side (versus EMT which is - largely - non-invasive). Cardiac arrest and dysrhythmia management (ECG interpretation, manual defib and pacing, approximately a dozen cardiac drugs), airway management and intubation (including sedatives, paralytics and analgesia), childbirth, trauma, burns. In my area we can give approximately 60 different meds IM, IV, IN, IO from fairly benign to quite acute (adenosine, atropine, etomidate, rocuronium, etc.)
The push for this is for at least two years of school, if not four.
But yet you have schools pumping out NPs in as little as a year and eight months? With zero field supervision (for better or worse, and with varying degrees of intensity, PAs ostensibly operate under physician supervision/direction).
This is going to cause a huge problem, I expect. Not the concept as a whole, but our YOLO attitude to these things, and schools seeing dollar signs.
I specifically pointed at older NPs for a reason.
Heck even old RNs will know what they are doing.
For us programmers it is a bit like why you don't let the new kid push straight to prod. But an older engineer may have a key to do it. ;) There is some wisdom that comes with the grey hair.