Overview and Summary: Advanced Practice Nursing

Seven articles are posted in this Issue. The first three articles discuss the CNS and NP role within psychiatric nursing. In the first article, Lego emphasizes the CNS role--although she also recognizes the need for the NP role in psychiatric nursing. In contrast, Puskar emphasizes the importance of the new NP role. A commonality between the two is that both argue that the CNS role should remain distinct from the NP role--although they have differing views about which should be the prominent role. In contrast, in the third article, Moller and Haber want to combine the roles. They argue that it is only a blended (CNS/NP) role within psychiatric nursing that makes sense. A particularly interesting point of these three articles is that each traces the roots of the CNS development within psychiatric nursing but come to slightly different conclusions. Each author comes to her own interpretation about what this history tells us in terms of the need for the CNS or NP or blended role today.

The next four articles discuss Advanced Practice Nursing on a more general level. Three of these articles argue that the CNS and NP roles should remain distinct. Lyon focuses on societal needs as a reason to keep the CNS and NP roles distinct as well as the fact that competencies required in the two roles are quite distinct. Cukr also emphasizes the differences in role functions--but she also describes the health care market forces that mandate the need for distinct roles. The third article stating that the roles should remain distinct is by Marie-Annette Brown. In this article she describes the need for a variety of advanced practice roles to meet the needs of today's health care system. The final article in this posting is by Annette Lynch. Lynch promotes the blended role for Advanced Practice Nursing. Specifically, she believes that the CNS + NP role adds up to a blended advanced practice nursing role that can meet the needs of health care consumers.