Nurse practitioners and physician associates in contemporary practice

This editorial introduces a special issue examining how nurse practitioner and physician associate practices have developed in parallel over several decades in the United States. Drawing on workforce, satisfaction, and training data from contributions to this issue, it documents substantial and roughly parallel professional growth nationally, alongside geographic and regulatory divergence. Survey data show that interprofessional collegiality is strongly associated with job satisfaction and retention, whereas other findings caution against collapsing the two professions into one category, given persistent differences in training, regulation, and satisfaction. The editorial calls for structured collaboration alongside profession-specific attention in workforce planning and measurement systems.