Approved by NAPNAP’s President
The National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners (NAPNAP) joined numerous advanced practice nursing organizations in an open letter regarding Bloomberg’s article “The Miseducation of America’s Nurse Practitioners” published on July 24, 2024. The biased article failed to accurately and fully report on the high quality, evidence-based care that our nation’s 300,000-plus nurse practitioners (NPs) provide to millions of patients each year. It also failed to mention that nursing remained the No. 1 trusted profession in the U.S. for more than 20 years while medical doctors fell to the fifth spot in Gallup’s 2023 poll. Rather, the writers focused on a few specific cases with tragic outcomes that involved NP-delivered care and comments from disgruntled students and clinicians to incite doubt and fear among patients.
While the writers seek to disparage the NP profession, our nation faces multiple pediatric health care crises:
- CDC: youth suicide is up 62% from 2007-2021
- CDC: childhood MMR immunization rates are falling under the Healthy People 2030 target of 95% to as low as 90% in some states
- CDC: number of measles cases as of July 2024 is three times higher than the total number of cases in 2023
- CDC: child and adolescent obesity prevalence from 2017-2020 was 19.7%, three times higher than it was in the 1970s
- Mental Health America: 20.17% of adolescents reported suffering a least one major depressive episode in the last year
Pediatric nurse practitioners, family nurse practitioners and other nurse practitioners caring for children have mastered nationally validated competencies and competency-based standards, been certified by nationally accredited boards, and licensed by state boards. As noted in the open letter from NP societies, there are “more than 50 studies that definitively demonstrate that NPs in the U.S. provide high-quality primary, acute and specialty health care services across the lifespan and in diverse settings.” NP experts caring for children provide evidence-based care to tens of millions of patients each year, especially those in underserved communities and the more than 37 million children enrolled in the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and Medicaid.
NAPNAP urges the media to present balanced information that fairly represents the increasingly valuable role that NPs play in our nation’s health care and the contributions NPs make to improving health outcomes.
Read the NP Organizations’ Open Letter
July 31, 2024