Last week, retail clinics were a hot topic. On Twitter, we retweeted an article from @Health_Affairs: ''New Web First online now. Retail Clinic Use Growing Rapidly http://tinyurl.com/9e4jh9y  (Free access for two weeks).'' The article highlights the benefits of convenient care, such as longer hours. However, our article The Forked Tongue of ...

Life has really settled down a little over 5 months into my job at the Martin County Health Department and my little satellite clinic in Oak City. As mentioned in previous posts, the Oak City Clinic was renovated from a little firehouse by a $56,000 grant from the GoldenLeaf Foundation. There was little money for necessary accoutrements so ...

If you're not following us on Facebook, ''like'' us and start sharing in the conversations! If you are, keep following and spread the word! This week, we posted the article ''Organizing and Investing to Expand Primary Care Availability with Nurse Practitioners'' by Peter J. Levin and Rick Bateman from Journal of Community Health to our ...

At the start of 2011, we published an article describing the job outlook for NPs and PAs this year. Based on our research and interviews with workforce experts, we crafted a headline for that article using the term ''changing landscape,'' and our cover image depicted an NP or PA partially protected by an umbrella. The expectation was that 2011 ...

Writing in today's issue of USA Today, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell champions nurse practitioners as the means to universal access to healthcare. Together with Tine Hansen-Turton, who is CEO of the National Nursing Centers Consortium headquartered in Philadelphia, Rendell argues that the projected primary care physician shortage could thwart ...

Should you open a practice? If so, what kind? During these unstable economic times it is difficult to decide if now is the time to take the risk and open your own clinic. A stable job with a guaranteed hourly wage is tempting. Even if it means you are working for someone else and have to punch a time-card. Still, in the back of your mind you ...

Leadership in unchartered terrain presents unique challenges especially in the midst of a volatile economic climate… Are we making the rules up in retail health as we go? Absolutely not. However, we are becoming proactive in our incessant efforts to refine the processes by which we apply the rules. It is essential that nurse leaders in retail ...

Medical groups have been throwing up all kinds of arguments against retail health clinics staffed by NPs. Here's a new one: Physicians are even quicker. In an article in yesterday's (Riverside, Calif.) Press-Enterprise, Dev Gnanadev, president-elect of the California Medical Association says, ''Health care is not McDonald's.'' But then he goes on ...

  Here at ADVANCE, we have been closely watching the convenience care revolution. The development of this business and practice model can be a great thing for nurse practitioners, but only if NPs take an active role in shaping it. At ACNP's clinical conference last month, 40 or so NPs attended a session on the retail health revolution. The ...