Nurses key to primary care?

A new report maintains that expanding the role of nurse practitioners could be “one of the most effective steps” to increasing access to primary care services for millions of Californians newly insured through the Affordable Care Act.

The report, released by the Bay Area Economic Institute, also noted that California could reduce its health care spending by $1.8 billion if nurse practitioners expanded their scope of practice, which would also attract more nurse practitioners to the state, according to California Healthline. The report’s authors wrote that such an increase would boost rural and low-income communities’ access to care, allow for about 2 million more annual preventive care visits in the state, and generally reduce costs to patients.

Beth Haney, president of the California Association for Nurse Practitioners, said that “allowing nurse practitioners to practice the health care they’ve been trained for is a key to making the [ACA] work effectively in California.”