We need to hear from you.  Non-Physician Practitioners are a valuable part of a physician-led team, but we increasingly understand that NPPs are practicing without adequate physician involvement, whether by their own choosing or not.

One major problem with reports regarding NPP “quality of care” is that near-misses aren’t routinely recorded or tracked.  The NPP gets “credit” for providing quality care to the patient, and nobody ever knows that there could have been harm if a physician hadn’t been involved.  Even more unsettling is that NPPs use this “data” to show that they provide safe, quality care, even going so far in some instances to claim superiority to that of physicians.  But their data is from physician-led care teams, not independent, unsupervised NPP practice.  These near-misses don’t get counted.

We need to educate legislators and colleagues on the importance of real-time supervision of NPPs, so that every patient can have a physician as the head of their care team. If you submit your story, we will not disclose your name.