Family Nurse Practitioner
By KEN MOSIER
For What2Be
Who am I?
Name: Leatha Ross
Titles: Family Nurse Practitioner
Director, Student Health Services
Affiliation: Wright State University
Education: B.S., Microbiology, University of Maryland
B.S., Nursing, Wright State University
M.S. Nursing Education, Wright State University
M.S. Family Nurse Practitioner, Wright State University
Quote: “(The Family Nurse Practitioner Exam) is a national certification exam. So while I might practice her in Ohio, I know my certificate would go anywhere in the country. My certificate to prescribe would vary from state to state,” she said.
What’s2Like:
►Patient-Nurse interaction
►Being able to assess patients
►Teaching
►Being able to write prescriptions
What’s Not 2 Like:
►Nurse practitioners sometimes cannot prescribe certain medications.
►Some testing facilities won’t accept a nurse practitioner’s signature.
►Insurance companies (especially Medicare) won’t reimburse NPs equally with physicians.
For Leatha Ross, it all started with her love of science. When she graduated from high school in her native Maryland, she enrolled at the University of Maryland and graduated with a degree in microbiology.
Nursing was not on her horizon.
“To be honest, I was fighting against it for a long time,” she said with a laugh. Working with a pair of OB/Gyn specialists, she spent a lot of time in the exam room. “I learned to do vital signs. I was doing that and talking to the patients and in the room with the physician and always asking questions. He made the comment one day, ‘you should go to nursing school.’
“After I finished the degree in microbiology, I learned something about myself — that I really did not enjoy being away from people. In a lab you were under a hood a lot of times and you didn’t have a lot of contact. I found that I really did enjoy talking to patients and being around them and figuring out what was going on and helping them through different aspects,” she explained.
Ross enrolled at Wright State University and graduated with a second bachelor’s degree — a B.S. in Nursing — and became a Registered Nurse.
She confessed to a second love — teaching. So she worked and got a master’s degree from WSU with a concentration in nursing education.
She then decided to become an Advanced Practice Nurse — in the field of Family Nurse Practitioner. “I completed the program in 14 to 16 months (at Wright State) because I already had a master’s,” she said.
AP Nurses can choose to follow such disciplines as Nurse Anesthetist, Nurse Midwife or Nurse Practitioner. “You can have Acute Care Nurse Practitioners, Pediatrics. Actually there is now also a geriatric AP Nurse,” Ross said. She chose to become a Family Nurse Practitioner.
She is currently Director of Student Health Services at the university.
Ross pointed out that an FNP can see patients across all age levels and can work with a pediatrician, in internal medicine or even in a hospital.
Once a nurse completes the curriculum, he/she must sit for a national certification exam. With that in hand, the new AP nurse then applies to get a certificate to write prescriptions. “Once you are approved to begin your certificate to prescribe, you work 1,500 additional hours in a clinical setting. You write prescriptions — the first 500 hours under the supervision of your physician. After the first 500, you write them independent of the physician and then the physician or the nurse practitioner with whom you are working signs off.”
Nurse practitioners can set up an independent practice. “If they have the money,” she said with a smile. “Currently my colleague has a practice in Springfield and she has two other nurse practitioners. They provide primary care which entails diagnosing and treating common health problems.
“When you are in practice by yourself, there is a scope of practice and you know what you are allowed to do — in other words, managing common chronic problems such as diabetes, hypertension, doing physicals, giving annual Pap Smears to females and taking care of people that have maybe…bronchitis, sinus infections, headiaches — just the common things,” she explained. The practice must also have a collaborating physician available if something is beyond the scope of the AP Nurse’s practice.
Ross pointed out that the national certification makes her eligible to work anywhere in the United States although her prescriptive powers may vary from state to state.
“While as a Family Nurse Practitioner (career) can be rewarding and kind of gives you a little sense of accomplishment, it is also a big responsibility being sure that you accurately treat your patients and give correct medication dosages and so forth.
“It is so important to keep up,” she said referring to the additional continuing education requirements in addition to those of a Registered Nurse.
Wright State’s School of Nursing requires a Registered Nurse to have at least two years of practice before entering the Advance Practice program.
Ross also noted that the school is about to graduate its first Doctor of Nursing Practice.
