Evaluating newly acquired authority of nurse practitioners and physician assistants for reserved medical procedures in the Netherlands: a study protocol.

The study protocol is designed to evaluate the effects of granting independent authorization for medical procedures to nurse practitioners and physician assistants on processes and outcomes of health care. Recent (temporarily) enacted legislation in Dutch health care authorizes nurse practitioners and physician assistants to indicate and perform specified medical procedures, i.e. catheterization, cardioversion, defibrillation, endoscopy, injection, puncture, prescribing and simple surgical procedures, independently. Formerly, these procedures were exclusively reserved to physicians, dentists a... Mehr ...