Because managed care is likely to feature prominently in a reformed health care system, policymakers need to examine the impact managed care will have on medical practice, physician supply, and access to primary care providers. Goals for work-force reform should focus on five areas: (1) training physicians in the generalist disciplines of family practice, general internal medicine, and general ...

P roviding high quality emergency care to acutely ill and injured patients has become more challenging than ever. There are increasing pressures from all sorts of different directions. Patients quite rightly expect better treatment, delivered with better communication. At the same time, emergency treatments have become increasingly sophisticated. As a result, it might be expected that it would ...

W I was a new graduate nurse working on a medicalsurgical unit, I assumed that Karen was a physician as she rounded and wrote patient care orders. Another nurse identified Karen as a nurse practitioner (NP) and opened my eyes to a whole new world of advanced nursing practice. I was curious to know more about NPs and physician assistants (PAs), whom I also saw in patient care. Was it legal for t...

DURING the past decade, interventional radiology (IR) has been transformed from a referral-based to a clinically based subspecialty. This has resulted in a fundamentally different type of workload for the practicing interventional radiologist. During this same time period, the scope of procedures provided by interventional radiologists continued to expand. A result of this decade of robust grow...