Published 18 September 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a1722
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a1722

Editor's Choice

What skills do doctors and nurses need?

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

What’s the difference between a doctor and a nurse? Our cover picture this week suggests that the differences are becoming harder to spot, and in this issue Rebecca Coombes explores the shifting and increasingly overlapping territories of the two professions (doi:10.1136/bmj.a1522). It’s easy to understand why the nurse’s role is expanding into traditionally medical areas of diagnosis and treatment: there’s the lower direct cost of employing nurses and the fact that they have more time to spend with patients.

But it’s not all plain sailing. There’s confusion over titles, a lack of nationally agreed standards on what training and experience are needed, and no proper regulation for advanced nurse practitioners in the UK. But other countries are further ahead, helped in some cases by graduate only entry to nurse training. So could nurses expand their roles even further? In our head to head debate, Bonnie Sibbald argues that . . . [Full text of this article]

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Rapid Responses:

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Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

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Sole Discriminant.

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