practice makes perfect

Finding Your Niche in the NP Market By Elisa Juarez & Ingrid Hinojosa

    Nurse Practitioners have become a trusted and needed presence in the healthcare field and in communities across the country.   Finding your niche in the market can be challenging and exciting, and it is the key to long-term personal satisfaction and professional development. 

    One of the first steps in finding your niche is to identify and understand your strengths, needs, and interests.  In addition to identifying your strengths, it is beneficial to know and understand your weaknesses, since these can be turned into strengths.  Awareness is the key, and the first step toward success.  There are many books, classes, and other tools available to assist with this process, including career assessment tools and coaching which are offered by many career consultants.  Here is a valuable truth for you to hold on to:  It is not what you do, but who you are that makes the difference. What you do and how you do it are important, but finding your niche is more about who you are, and what you have to give.

    The next step is to ask yourself the following questions:

1. What type of clientele do I want to work with?
2. What do I want to be doing?
3. What do I value most in a work environment?
4. What are my objectives (short-term and long-term)?
5. How hard am I willing to work?
6. Do I want to have my own practice?

   

    Thirdly, become familiar with the many benefits NPs offer to doctors, patients, and communities and present them to potential employers.  These include the following:

Nurse Practitioners…

1) take a load off doctors, allowing them more time for critical and complicated cases

2) allow for a higher volume of patients

3) are more accessible to patients than the doctor

4) can spend time with patients and use an educational approach to health and wellness

5) have prescriptive authority in most states

6) offer cost-effective care

Perhaps your process is guided by a desire to serve where there is the greatest need, which would be in medically underserved areas.  If you are also interested in having your own practice, you can do a needs assessment to find one of these areas.  You will also need to find a supervising physician and get your own Medicaid and Medicare numbers.  Going the entrepreneurial route requires marketing, commitment, and hard work.  Business knowledge, including marketing and management, are as important as medical training.  A career assessment would be especially valuable if you are considering this option, since it reveals your interpersonal style and skills, management style, career interests and needs, and the types of positions that would be the best fit for you.  Since going this route involves greater risk than working for someone else, it would be wise to do an in-depth assessment of the requirements, challenges, and benefits, along with your personal career assessment.

     Another recommendation in finding your niche is to become aware of legislative issues that pertain to nurse practitioners and the people they serve.  Getting involved in a professional association and other NP organizations is an excellent way to stay on top of the issues and collaborate with other NPs to make a difference in the industry.  This is an exciting time for NPs to be involved, as they are carving out their niche and increasing public awareness in the healthcare market.   Take the time to read articles, talk to other nursing professionals, and become an expert in your field.  As you find and develop your own niche, you will also be adding to the strength and credibility of nurse practitioners throughout the industry. 

Elisa Juarez is President of MasterQuest Recruiting & Consulting, Arlington, TX.  Her firm specializes in healthcare, particularly physicians and nurse practitioners.  They offer career assessment and coaching services, as well as search and placement services.  For more information, please visit www.mquestrecruit.com, or contact Elisa at [email protected], (817)561-4933.

 

Ingrid Hinojosa, RN, MSN, FNP-C, is owner of Integrated Family Healthcare in Grand Prairie, TX, and is in the process of opening additional clinics in underserved areas.  She has many years experience in rural medicine in south Texas, and once served as an investigator for the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners.  She is a certified Childbirth Educator, and still puts in hours as an RN on the Med-Surg floor of an area hospital.

www.intergratedfamilyhealthcare.com   (972)262-4700

Morality and Medical Skills

Weekend Edition on NPR aired an interesting piece this morning on the correlation between medical students' development of medical skills vs. development of moral conviction. They cited two rather disturbing studies which concluded that the further a student progresses in medical school, the harder it becomes to continue developing their moral and ethical standards in caring for patients.

The primary deterrent to this development rests on the "system" which places interns and their decisions under the direct control of the people responsible for their evaluations, and consequently, their successful career launch. Interviews with these young doctors revealed feelings of mental conflict when they were placed in positions where they were told how to handle patients and their close relatives in morally or ethically sensitive situations. In many cases, they felt coerced to ignore their gut feelings in order to appease the doctor in charge. Interestingly, students' loss of guilt or conflict in these situations increased the further they progressed in their training - in direct opposition to the gain in medical skills during training.

Therefore, the study hypothesizes, when doctors finally enter real positions of authority, they have traveled backward, instead of forward, in what is considered the "normal" evolution of a persons' moral and ethical sensitivity. Hear the NPR piece with study references here.

Not being a doctor, I cannot say this is true, but I can relate it to the larger world, where the ramifications tend to be subtler. As well as being depicted as an issue in medicine on such shows as E.R., this denial of self autonomy manifests itself in all of academia (particularly the sciences), as well as existing in healthy doses in the corporate world.

My husband is a scientist who holds views that are unpopular (but cannot be disproved) in the academic scientific community. Anyone who disagrees with unproven, yet widely accepted hypotheses is ridiculed and ignored, without any objective review of their work. Students are coerced into espousing the beliefs of the professors who control whether or not they will receive their graduate degree. Anyone who thinks objectively or independently is discouraged from considering other viewpoints. Most significantly, the peer review process is the final blow against independent thought. I'm sure here, too, there’s a direct correlation between the volume of information absorbed and the increasing acceptance of how to work the "system" by maintaining the status quo.

One of the reasons I'm here now, writing this blog, maintaining physician-central, and working on other research projects is because I don't feel I can ever go back to the corporate hierarchy that regularly made me question whether I would be expected to do something I didn't personally feel comfortable with. In some cases, it seemed the less ethical a person was, the higher they rose, and the more authority they gained over more people. Political alliances and the party line seemed more important than the product or service we were ostensibly entrusted with providing.

The point is, this is a phenomenon that is inherent in all institutions. Doctors and hospitals are not immune, it just seems more sensational when you apply it to the ultimate moral dilemmas surrounding life and death.

Community Involvement - I'm Curious

Physicians have always played an integral role in the fabric of any community. Every frontier town in the TV westerns had one who was an important character in every episode. Even the new HBO series "Deadwood", filled with gruesome, evil excuses for humanity, has a somewhat benevolent and caring 'doc' trying to patch-up all the inhumanity around him.
The important contributions doctors quietly made behind the scenes in frontier America were probably well known through the grapevine, but in today's fast-paced, high tech, and litigious society, how do you find the time, energy and venue to make a difference outside your office? Are you able to coach a sports team or volunteer in an area outside of medicine? Do those activities relieve stress, or contribute to it? I'm just curious.