What are the Benefits of the APRN Consensus Model in Relationship to Access to Healthcare for Patients in Underserved Areas?

Answer

What are the Benefits of the APRN Consensus Model in Relationship to Access to Healthcare for Patients in Underserved Areas?

The healthcare sector has often demanded the implementation of mechanisms that aim at increasing the quality of care and outcome. This has seen service providers, including nurses, embrace different plans and models for efficiency in practice. This has been because of the changes in healthcare demands arising from complexities in health factors and the need to embrace the evidence-based practice. Primarily, the transformation of nursing education has been vital toward this course with exciting opportunities to implement a lifelong education plan that ensures they have the right skills and qualifications. Key to these strategies is the formulation of the Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs) Consensus Model, which outlines critical recommendations for uniform regulations for the APRN accreditation, education, licensure, and certification across the United States (Plagenhoef & Philp, 2016). The model has proved very important concerning access to healthcare for patients' in-underserved areas, which this paper seeks to highlight.

The primary objective of the model is to create a unified understanding of the role of APRN's between the public, medical practitioners, national, and state legislatures. In this way, the model primarily seeks to support the APRN's ability to provide services to the patients across the board to the best of their qualifications and training. During the development of the model, the series of discussions focused on the definition of APRN's roles and the scope of their practice, subsequently being uniform, irrespective of geographical location. Such would make it possible to appreciate the skills, knowledge, and experience demonstrated by this sect of nurses, thereby aiding to uphold the standards of professionalism required in nursing (Chism, 2017).

The model ensures nurses with the same qualifications and experience are available in the underserved areas, which sees to it that they get the best services as their counterparts in other regions. Previously, lack of standardization was a significant hindrance to the nursing practice's success since it was difficult to move across states and still provide services fully of your training (LIST, 2008). Therefore, with a standardized approach in care and legislation of the changes in APRN, the model correct the deficiency thus making it possible to swop nurses and conduct staff balancing so that the underserved areas receive the right services (Chism, 2017). It also helps in the delivery of patient-centered care that has proven to improve the quality of care outcomes. Furthermore, the model enhances the delivery of primary care rather than specialty care, which broadens the scope of APRNs' practice.

Although there have been several demonstrations that APRNs provide cost-effective and high-quality care compared to other service providers, the implementation of the model is further beneficial to the patients in both well and underserved areas. Notably, the patients are set to enjoy improved access to healthcare, increased patient safety, and excellent patient outcomes. This will arise from increased levels of professionalism and educational qualifications that are similar to all the APRNs (Chism, 2017). Thus, the patients in the underserved areas will experience more satisfaction from the overall care as well as receiving cost-effective care that will lead to savings on the cost of care.

Moreover, with the APRN nurses' involvement in grassroots campaigns to propel the state boards in adopting the legislative language as recommended by the APRN Consensus model, it will have a spillover effect on the underserved areas. This will arise where the state boards will have to implement legislative language that works toward their benefit and improvement of care for patients in these areas (Plagenhoef & Philp, 2016). Additionally, the model helps in eliminating the barriers to nursing practice, thereby allowing innovative strategies to improve the health care system in every area. These innovations are critical toward an overall improvement in the quality of care and health outcome for every patient.