How emergency nurse practitioners view their role within the emergency department: A qualitative study

The Emergency Nurse Practitioner (ENP) role has become established over the last two decades within emergency care. This role has developed to meet the rising demands of healthcare, combat the continuing medical workforce shortfall and address targets around healthcare delivery within emergency care. The ENP role has been widely evaluated in terms of patient satisfaction, safety and outcome. To date there is no published literature exploring what drives senior nurses to undertake this role which involves additional clinical responsibility and educational preparation for no increase in pay.

This research seeks to explore how Emergency Nurse Practitioners view their role within the Emergency Department and Emergency Care Team.

A qualitative approach was utilised in order to gain greater in-depth understanding of ENPs' perspectives. A purposive sample of eight ENPs was chosen and semi-structured interviews were digitally recorded. The transcribed interviews were subjected to thematic analysis to look for any recurrent themes.

Following analysis of the data, four main themes emerged with a total of eight sub themes. The findings suggested that whilst the role had been accepted amongst doctors within the ED, there was still a lack of understanding of the role outside the ED and conflict still existed amongst junior nurses. ENPs were motivated to undertake the role in order to gain greater job satisfaction. The findings also highlighted the concerns regarding financial remuneration for the role, lack of standardisation of the role and educational preparation.

The study concludes that education has a key role in the development and acceptance of the role and that ENPs are disappointed with the lack of financial remuneration for the role.