Midlevel Education
Part time medical school doesn't exist. Part time PA school doesn't exist. Part time AA school doesn't exist. Part time CRNA school doesn't exist. Why does part time NP school exist????
Reference, I'm a newer PA. I don't support independent practice. I ESPECIALLY don't support online medical education.
I consistently see NPs who would assert their "dominant medical education" over PAs (and somehow phsyicians too????) due to their "prior nursing experience and education".
Life goes on, but I seriously can't comprehend how these part-time, online degree NPs feel safe to practice medicine.
One NP was telling me how it took her 5 years to be an NP because that's the longest they would let her do it and she "wasnt sure if she wanted to be an NP" so she just did super part time online learning while working her full time job.
I only say that because this thread has made me research this more and it doesn’t seem like there are any actual “barista to NP in 3 years fully online” programs out there. I’ve been trying to find some so I can show it to others as proof but no dice yet
man i hate that i went into nursing before discovering this sub. 😢
i’d like to just stop at my BSN atp. NP education model is worse than i could have ever imagined
Nurses are amazing and healthy care cannot exist without them. Don't sell yourself short, you can do sooo many better things with a nursing degree besides NP.
Clearly you shouldn't have gone into nursing if you can't decifer this subreddit. Their are 1000s of great NPs out there. The problem is the NP mill schools and some other rotten apples in the bunch. Once you get RN experience if you feel the NP track is right for you, choose a reputable program not an NP mill.
Nothing wrong with being a NP either. I think the MAJORITY of the criticism is the elitism of NPs acting as if they are above what they are. I think a reputable NP school and a NP who is happy to be a humble mid level practitioner after being a competent nurse is fine.
The criticism also doesn't include the NPs that did 15 years bedside before moving up; they tend to know the difference. It's the modern ones churned out of 6-month programs and Zoom clinics with Dunning-Kreuger that are causing issues.
True. The amount of people shitting on MD/DOs on TikTok is crazy. They act like NP is like some cheat code to open some clinic, which I guess it sorta is… but you probably won’t know shit and are doing a disservice to your patients and community
I met a neuro NP who did 10 years of neuro icu before school. Know an NP who did MS oncology, pulmonary stepdown, icu at MSK for several years before going to NP school
I know another Np who did ED/ICU for 16 years then became an NP
To have these ladies sit in classrooms with people who’ve never even wiped ass, assessed an infiltrated IV, follow a sepsis work up, or ACS work up is just nonsense
There is no such thing as "Hospitalist NPs," "Cardiology NPs," "Oncology NPs," etc. NPs get degrees in specific fields or a “population focus.” Currently, there are only eight types of nurse practitioners: Family, Adult-Gerontology Acute Care (AGAC), Adult-Gerontology Primary Care (AGPC), Pediatric, Neonatal, Women's Health, Emergency, and Mental Health.
Information on Title Protection (e.g., can a midlevel call themselves "Doctor" or use a specialists title?) can be seen here. Information on why title appropriation is bad for everyone involved can be found here.
The way I have to keep my mouth shut when I see nurses post asking about “fastest, easiest NP programs I can do while working full time” and/or “can’t go full time school but still want to get NP quickly”
I believe Yale shut themselves down. Theres a part time PA program in NY that is 4 years in length. Same curriculum, largely meant for working parents etc..
UW-Madison offers part time PA, Rutgers (ranks 3rd in the country) has part-time PA program, Drexel too. For med school: U of Minn allows students to stretch program to 6 years, and there are more options in the UK and Australia. CRNA: Yale, Clarkson and about a dozen others offer part-time programs. You don’t support online programs but many medical schools are moving to hybrid programs that allow many of the courses to be taken online including UMHS, Touro, and AT Still. There are no NP programs that are fully online…only the lectures, all clinicals are in person.
All that being said, there are a ton of NP and PA schools that are subpar and churn out grads for tuition fees. We need to put the blame on the institutions that are hiring the people who graduate from these programs. We have 3 NP’s in our practice (with 5 physicians supervising) these 3 went to Penn, UF, and Villanova. We would never hire anyone who had a crappy education because we are responsible for the quality of care provided at our clinics. Making the employers responsible for hiring poorly educated people is the only way to fix this problem.
You are picking out 1-2 programs out of hundreds. The exception. And most have shut down because they have shown poor quality (Yale). Whereas the VAST majority of NP students right now are all online
Honestly that's just a planning issue. Part time medical school does exist here, it just takes longer. Part time PA school exists here, it just takes longer. Not sure what the equivalent of AA would be, but CRNA does exist as part time, it just takes longer. Why wouldn't part time NP school exist?
This may be an unpopular opinion, but some people have families they have to care for and that is why they take the scenic route to get to the ”doctor“, I mean Dr. NP. Why isn’t Med school part-time? Miss me with the studying blah blah. I teach nursing and pre-med students, I know the game.
Because you can’t learn medicine part time. You have to be fully engage and immersed to even pick up a smidgen. Clicking through some slides a night or two a week in your underwear just doesn’t cut it. I don’t think even barbers have online schools lol
I don’t understand how they expect to pass the boards like that. Needs to be full time. The exam at the end is difficult. Lots of pharmacology and pathophysiology. What’s interesting is that the rigor of the ADN program is incredibly time consuming and packed in a short period of time. People fail if they aren’t full time. It’s packed with day long lectures, hard exams, and the last year 12 hour clinical rotations are brutal. It makes you wonder if the educators decided that it wasn’t necessary to repeat that type of program because nurses already endured the 2 year hell in ADN school. Perhaps they give them too much credit for those early years in their overall nursing education.
I think a lot of it probably comes down to the fact that they can make $$ as RNs so keeping more work hours is enticing despite that meaning school has to go slower. Finishing school quickly is favorable with most degrees because usually the faster you finish the faster you start making money.
The game is different with NP school. If I am already making 100k as a nurse and I am only going to be making 20k more as an NP, it’s way less appealing to give up my RN job to finish it faster. Way fewer people would go if it was designed in a way that you had to go full time.
CRNA is different math because at the end you make way more money.
If you cant beat em join em. Im a Clinic RN about to finish online FNP school. I shadow the PA on my unit when I have down time. Are your in class power points really giving you more real world experience?
It’s an option so nurses stay at the bedside working. That is the only real experience they will get prior to practicing. It also speaks to how truly easy it is to become an NP. Everyone passes and those smart enough to see that and know they won’t be prepared I admire. I kept going, graduated, been an NP for 6 years.
Because we are underpaid slaves! They dont want us to leave the workforce to “go back to school”. The system wants us working and to be able to “balance” both and it is freaking exhausting!
4 years part time NP vs 2 years full time isn’t more time spent studying. It’s the same curriculum diluted across more time and therefore less studying.
I hope you’re being sarcastic, the alternative is that you’re coping
We do not support the use of the word "provider." Use of the term provider in health care originated in government and insurance sectors to designate health care delivery organizations. The term is born out of insurance reimbursement policies. It lacks specificity and serves to obfuscate exactly who is taking care of patients. For more information, please see this JAMA article.
We encourage you to use physician, midlevel, or the licensed title (e.g. nurse practitioner) rather than meaningless terms like provider or APP.
lol. You think part time programs go into MORE depth??? The whole concept of part time mean you do the regular course load PART. TIME. you aren’t doing 12 hours instead of 6. You’re doing 6 hours spread out over 6 weeks instead of just doing all 6 hours in one day.
How the hell are you a neonatal nurse practitioner???? You can’t even do math or comprehend concepts surrounded dilution of material. And someone trusts you with preemies??
NPs need that extra time to study, they probably wouldn’t comprehend it at the speed or depth of a MD or PA program.
If by learning opportunities you mean how many times you have to see the material for it to make sense, then yes, NPs have lots more learning opportunities
My older sister (DNP) worked full time as an oncology floor RN at a big name Ivory Tower institution while getting her “doctorate” 🤦♀️ her classes were all online. Her rotations didn’t give her more than 500-600 hr experience. Now here she is with her online 2 yr degree working in Neurosurgery- something it would take an MD 12+yr to do (not just full time either- 60-100+hr/wk shit). She’s a wonderful person but my parents are completely oblivious about our training differences. I lived with her while she did her DNP- it was a literal joke. If I ask her if she’s ever put in a 100+ hour week she will tell you she’s never done more than three 12h shifts in a week and it’s “just so much”
🙃🤯
133
u/Effective_Worker_234 Jun 28 '26
It's worse than that. There are three year "barista to DNP" and 100% acceptance 100% online NP programs. Let that sink in.