The content of care provided by family nurse practitioners

The content of care provided by 30 graduates of the UCLA Primex (Family Nurse Practitioner) program was examined. An encounter form similar to that used in the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey was employed to code patients' complaints. These practitioners had been specifically trained to provide care for ambulatory patients. Data were collected one year after the completion of the university didactic phase of the program. We found that Primex practitioners spent more time with patients, more often employed traditional nursing functions, and more often used medical investigative procedures, such as x-rays and laboratory tests than did the physicians in the NAMC survey. Although the types of problems seen varied according to the organizational setting, these nurse practitioners were more often assigned routine health examinations and less often saw certain kinds of acute health care problems than had been anticipated in their training; 116 different types of symptoms or problems were presented, with a total of 1,170 encounters.