This memoir describes the education of nurse practitioners, their scope of practice, their abilities to prescribe medications and diagnostic tests, and their overall management of patients’ acute and chronic illnesses. In doing so, it explores the issues in primary health care delivery to poor, urban populations and investigates the factors affecting health care delivery in the United States that have remained obscure throughout the current national debate.

Preface

1. Bread Is Not Sugar
2. Health Care: Perspectives from the Street Level
3. Nurse, Are You a Doctor?
4. Protection of the Public or Creation of a Guild?
5. Context, Data, and Judgment: When Is Enough, Enough?
6. Barriers, Opportunities, and Militancy

Epilogue
Index

FRANCES WARD is professor emerita at Temple University where she served as David R. Devereaux Chair of Nursing. The founding dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, she maintains a clinical practice as an adult nurse practitioner. She is the author of On Duty: Power, Politics, and the History of Nursing in New Jersey (Rutgers University Press).