I was having a hard time trying to find an article based
around St. Lawrence County. Being from California I found this one but it has a
couple of points pertaining healthcare in general in the USA. Lawmakers in
California are working on ways to expand the scope of healthcare practitioners
so they can better work with one another and fill the lack of providers.
Now, under
President Obama’s healthcare act more people have insurance and therefore the
need to have more practitioners is greater than ever. This need combined with
the shortage in rural areas have prompted lawmakers to fill the gap by
redefining who can provide healthcare. On top of allowing PAs and NPs to treat
patients more independently, they are pushing to try and get Pharmacists and
optometrists to act as primary care providers. The article quotes and I agree
with “Physician assistants, nurse
practitioners, pharmacists and optometrists agree that they have more training
than they are allowed to use.” By giving the practitioners more scope of practice,
they would be able to better serve the community and work with each other to
offer more services to the growing need.
The article quotes an optometrist
that complains of frequently seeing people that he knows to have diabetes but
by law can’t diagnose them and must refer them elsewhere. It seem like a more
beneficial use of the optometrists education would be to also help out these
milder forms of diabetes and only refer the more serious cases to the primary
care providers. If this idea could be adopted to rural areas, it could help
fill the void. Already in a rural county in California, two clinical
pharmacists have taken control of the diabetes clinic treating about 500
people. Again if more places would allow its healthcare providers to expand
their scope of practice, more patients would be able to be treated.
This idea would make it so someone
doesn’t always have to see a specialist when a disease is minor and thereby
freeing up more time for the specialist to see more patients. By allowing more
healthcare providers to expand their scope, patients who have a slightly
elevated blood pressures or at risk for diabetes would be able to get
preventative treatment more readily.
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-doctors-20130210,0,1509396
I think it will be important for all health professionals to work together efficiently in the future as more people enter the health care system under the new Health Care Laws. One area where I am confused about the expansion of roles is with the optometrist. Although I have no doubt an optometrist could easily help to diagnose diabetes, what training have they received to help treat and manage this life changing disease. Diabetes is a disease that affects every aspect of a persons body, not only their eyes, and the treatments for this disease can have complex interactions and ramifications. I believe the real problem is not that the optometrist should treat the diabetic, but that instead the process of referral for further health workup by a physician or other health professional be streamlined to make this process easier and ensure these patients are taken care of. I believe in this way the optometrists could provide an important role of helping bring people into the health care system that need help.
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