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Home › Articles › Professionals and Policies › A Personal Touch

A Personal Touch

Choosing a Nurse Practitioner as Your Pregnancy Primary Care Provider

By Kim Cooper Findling

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How do you choose an obstetrician? Most people open the yellow pages and scan through the physician section or they ask their insurance provider for a list of physicians that are included in their plans.

What most women don't realize is they may be overlooking another category of professionals who can provide excellent, holistic, integrated primary health care: family nurse practitioners.

A Need for Nurse Practitioners
Tracy Boland of Eagle Point, Ore., works for a pharmaceutical company and has chosen a nurse practitioner as her primary care professional. "From a patient's standpoint, nurse practitioners offer good, old-fashioned 'bedside manners' in tandem with high quality, comprehensive health care," she says.

Nurse practitioners (NPs) have been around for more than 30 years and have traditionally worked in a variety of settings, including hospitals, clinics, schools, nursing homes and alongside doctors in private practices.

Yet as doctors have become more overburdened and medicine more specialized, nurse practitioner scope of practice policies have expanded to fill the gaps in family health care. Many states now allow NPs to practice under their own licenses (10 percent of NPs now have their own practices) and to serve as patients' primary care professionals, including during pregnancy. Most states allow NPs to prescribe medications, order and evaluate diagnostic labs and call for other diagnostic tests, and diagnose and treat acute health problems and chronic issues. In addition, most health and insurance plans recognize family NPs as primary care providers (PCPs).

More Time for Care
Patients, many of whom are more and more frustrated with what sometimes feels like rushed care from traditional medical environments, are responding. In increasing numbers, patients are turning to NPs for primary care – and not just because they get the same care as they would under a doctor, but because many feel they get better care with an NP.

In a 2002 British Medical Journal

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