Legislator Communication Dear Representative Pigman,

It is my great privilege to thank you for sponsoring CS/HB 7011: Health Care Access Bill (Florida Senate, 2017). I highly support this bill and encourage patients in our community of Lee County, Cape Coral, Florida, to do so as well. I am an advanced practiced registered nurse (APRN) and I and my colleagues all appreciate what you are doing to help us overcome the restrictive challenges that current legislation and policies have on preventing us from providing the kind of quality care that we have been trained to provide to patients.

This bill is important because as the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (ODPHP, 2017) has noted in its Healthy People 2020 campaign, access to health services is one of the most crucial and important problems that needs to be addressed in the U.S. One of the big hurdles to addressing this problem is that too few providers are available to give quality care. Your bill will help to answer that problem by freeing APRNs to practice as they are intended to practice, which is what the Institute of Medicine (2012) has also called for in its treatise on the “Future of Nursing.”

Current policy is restrictive and prevents APRNs from practicing to their fullest extent possible unless a physician is there to provide oversight. The fact is that APRNs are fully qualified to provide quality care, diagnose and prescribe treatment without the oversight of a physician. Indeed, that was the entire point of educating and training APRNs—to get more able-bodied care providers into the industry who could operate independently of physicians and provide patients with the type of care they require (Lewenson, McAllister & Smith, 2016; Lofgren, Berends, Reyes, et al., 2017).

What CS/HB 7011: Health Care Access Bill would do is it would allow independent APRNs to practice advanced...

It would also authorize Florida-licensed health care providers to utilize new technology like telehealth to provide quality care as well. These two options of providing care would greatly facilitate Florida’s need to provide patients with a broader range of options so that the problems that the community is facing in terms of obtaining access to care might be alleviated. These problems include too few people (both children and adults) obtaining access to health care (CDC, 2016).
The stakeholders who would benefit from the policy change intended by your bill include patients, providers and tax payers. Indeed, the latter stand to save a substantial amount of money, as much of what they spend in taxes goes to housing prisoners who suffer from mental problems that have never been treated because of this lack of access to care. Patients would benefit as it would allow them to have more options in terms of where they can go for preventive care or for treatment. Instead of always having to rely on a physician, they can go to an APRN and obtain care. Providers would also benefit because they would not be so overworked and overbooked: cases could be spread around with APRNs available to take on more work independently of physicians. In other words, there would be more access to quality care because APRNs would finally be allowed to do their job. This bill could greatly impact the nursing practice by encouraging other states to pass the same type of legislation and finally get APRNs to occupy the place in the health care industry that they were intended to occupy from the beginning. As Englebright (2017) notes, the demand for APRNs continues to grow because these nurses have a great deal of specialization services to offer a public with a wide range of needs, desires and demands. The health care system as a whole would benefit…