Emphasising the 'nurse' in nurse practitioner : challenges for educational preparation

The Nurse Practitioner (NP) role is an exciting dynamic area of advanced nursing practice in contemporary health care. Emerging in the US in the mid-1960s, the NP role is now also established in Canada, the UK, Ireland, parts of Europe and Asia, Australia and New Zealand. It is now estimated that up to 40 countries worldwide have initiated NP programmes or are working towards this (Middleton et aI., 2007)...An important aim of this chapter is to locate NP roles very firmly within the discipline of nursing, and to consider the implications of this from an educational perspective.