Some doctors don’t like being referred to as a provider. I’m not crazy about it myself but I can’t help but think that the doctors spawned the term.
Take anesthesiologists, for example. Some got in the game of outnumbering themselves with nurse anesthetists. Neonatologists learned that nurse practitioners could do their bread and butter.
And it’s all fun and games until they start calling you a provider. Because advanced practitioners can do a lot of the providing that doctors do. And some of them provide the most important stuff better. When there’s little difference between you and your advanced practitioner, you become a provider.
But when you deliver something that no one else in the room can deliver then you’ll have your own designation.
Until then, we’re alike.
Image via the National Library of Medicine, King George Military Hospital, London, 1915.
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The Health Language Police – The post that got me thinking about ‘providers’ and other ambiguous clinical designations.