Bone marrow aspiration and biopsy: a guideline for procedural training and competency assessment

The growing role of nurse practitioners (NPs) in today's demanding health-care system has allowed for a more comprehensive and complementary approach to patient care. Within the past few years, NPs have expanded their role to include invasive procedures. Limited research in the utilization of NPs has suggested equality among procedures performed by NPs when compared with those conducted by their physician counterparts. Nurse practitioners and their colleagues need to take an active role in developing protocols to train practitioners and assess their procedural competency. We suggest such a guideline for training NPs to perform invasive procedures and to confirm procedural competency, using bone marrow biopsies and aspirates as an example. Future research should be directed not only at the overall quality of biopsies obtained, but also toward patient satisfaction scores in procedures performed by NPs.