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Wall Street Journal Shows Its Backside

Posted on April 2, 2008 by Annie

[UPDATE] My comment on the offending post didn’t appear for some time and then was inserted between prior published comments. I am adding it at the foot of this post.
[UPDATE DEUX] Right on cue, right wing med blogger, Kevin Pho, chimes in with his own brand of anti-nursing, conflation of issues screeching.
The WSJ Health Blog put on its best gender biased, turn of the Nineteenth Century paternalistic presentation of a fabricated problem with the nursing profession’s push to educate more nurses at the doctoral level. The public is ill served by tripe such as this. Readers will come away with the message that those nasty, not-quite-legitimate handmaidens of physicians are acting up, are defying their vows of obedience and obsequiousness, and are trying to take over medicine’s turf, while double-crossing patients and providing second rate care:

Nursing schools are making a push to award doctor of nursing degrees, a move that has some physicians and nurses worried, the WSJ’s Laura Landro reports.

No - not DN degrees, Doctor of Nursing Practice degrees - DNP. And doctoral education for nursing is not new - it’s been present since the early part of the twentieth century. Columbia, Yale, NYU, Case Western Reserve University, Johns Hopkins, Wayne State, Ohio State University, Vanderbilt, Emory, UCSF, University of Washington - all have doctoral nursing programs - and that’s just off the top of my head.

Dawn Bucher, a DNP, treats a child patient at Ivanhoe Clinic in Ivanhoe, Minn. Will this confuse the child?

More than 200 schools have started or are readying programs, and the National Board of Medical Examiners has agreed to develop a voluntary certification exam to establish a national standard for doctors of nursing practice.

A fresh supply of well-trained primary care practitioners could help counter a physician shortage.

Preparing nurses at the doctoral level isn’t entirely aimed at alleviating physician shortages. It is aimed at preparing more nursing researchers, more nursing faculty and more nurses able to advance the profession via new knowledge and the advancement of professional nursing practice. To frame doctoral education initiatives for nursing as a physician turf issue is dishonest, distorted and misleading - to the public, to nurses and to physicians.

The goal is to create “hybrid practitioner” who will have more skills and training than a nurse practitioner with a master’s degree, Mary Mundinger, dean of New York’s Columbia University School of Nursing, tells Landro. She adds that these students are being trained to have more focus than doctors on coordinating care among specialists and health-care settings.

But wait, nurse advocates say, there’s a nursing shortage too.

Here the AACN nursing shortage FAQ is linked, which is OK. But nurse advocates - who are they? No source or person is cited, and no nurse advocate, to my knowledge, is stating that the nursing shortage will worsen with the preparation of more nurses at the doctoral level. Infact, that is 180 degrees wrong. More doctorally prepared nurses will provide more nursing faculty, more nursing researchers and more nurses advancing nursing practice and new nursing knowledge.

Read rest here

There is a reason why I go to well-written and sourced blogs for my information.A great deal of MSM is bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.