Nurse practitioner practice management.

Thirty nurse practitioners in clinical practice in rural Idaho and Utah responded to a questionnaire determining the level of decision making regarding managerial tasks, level of perceived managerial adequacy, and level of perceived managerial adequacy, and level of management training obtained by the respondent. No empirical studies about nurse practitioner practice management have been published. Various component functions of the management process were described in the general literature. The most relevant to clinical practice management were planning, organizing, directing, controlling, and coordinating. The conceptual framework for the study was general systems theory. The focus was the regulatory process manifested by the employee subsystem in the form of managerial task function within the focal practice system. The instrument was a questionnaire designed by the investigator. Each participant returned the complete questionnaire to the investigator within a set time period of two months. Since most of the data were nominal and ordinal, the principal analysis was through frequency distributions, percentages, Chi-square analysis, and Pearson Product-Moment correlations. Rural nurse practitioners in Utah and Idaho were found to exhibit active participation in protocol production and use, and it setting objectives for clinical practice. Rural nurse practitioners were found to exhibit no participation in financial or monetary planning and control, or in coordination of the internal practice system. A small minority of the rural nurse practitioners consistently performed all five functions of clinical practice management process. The participatory minority exhibited the characteristics of the highest income level ($25,000+ per year), the higher age level (36+ years old), and masters level education preparation. The rural nurse practitioners exhibited perceived inadequacy to perform financially oriented management tasks for the clinical practice. The respondents had no formal management training. Further study is recommended to clarify empirically nurse practitioner clinical practice management behaviors with an instrument presenting interval level data enabling a more sophisticated analysis.