Under fire....

I have had an interesting week on the web. In response to an article on the website www.6minutes.com.au entitled "Should Nurses be Doctors?" I responded with a clarication about the role and qualifications of nurse practitioners. Well! I have never been in receipt of such vitriol in my life! Assumptions about who I was, supposed claims of being "hardworking and smart", 'massaging my ego" and so on and so forth from GPs and others.
Anyway I then enlisted the support of the nurse practitioners and NP candidates who are APNA members to add their contributions to the debate, which they did very ratioanlly and calmly (in comparison to some of the other contributions). The whole discussion became a much broader discussion about nursing as a profession and then towards the end about best management of exercise induced asthma.
Despite acknowledging that GPs who contribute to web forums such as this may not be your typical GP, the expereince highlighted some things for me of concern. there were alot of assumptions made about who I was and what I was saying which were not in writing. Do they do this with patients? Likewise there was very selective use of evidence. Finally ideology was expressed as fact - and that for me is the essential difficulty for all of us in this debate.
Should we engage in such silly debate? I suspect yes - we need to keep calmly and rationally stating the evidence and the facts. As more and more on the ground GPs enjoy the experience of working alongside nurses of all level and skill bases and in a collegiate and respectful manner, debates such as these will become obsolete as they are becoming in other countries such as the UK.