Assignment: Prohibited Health Plans
Assignment: Prohibited Health Plans

Journal of the New York State Nurses Association, Volume 42, Numbers 1 & 2
Barriers to Practice and Impact on Care

Removal of barriers to treatment through passage of the NP Modernization Act will streamline access to treatment. Currently, there is a lack of access to appropriate services for patients with major mental illness (Feldman et al., 2003). Once NP provider barriers are removed, patients will be able to access treatment more freely. The NP Modernization Act will position psychiatric NPs as a source for mental health care within the community, whether it is through a private office practice or within a public health clinic setting. In addition, the bill will potentially allow psychiatric NPs to open nurse-run mental healthcare clinics and offer cost-effective care that could save the state millions of dollars.I, the American Psychiatric Association announced that there are diminishing numbers of psychiatric residents. According to Vine (2009), there are currently 38,000 psychiatrists in the United States. An additional 5,450 practitioners are needed to bring the ratio to one psychiatrist for every 10,000 people. Armstrong and Forte (2010) completed exit interviews with psychiatric residents. In New York State, there were 230 psychiatric residents and 53 child and adolescent residents that left residency in that year. Of those reported, 48% planned to work in urban areas, and only 4% planned to practice in rural areas (Armstrong & Forte, 2010). Psychiatric NPs are the logical alternative to continue to allow open access to high quality mental health care.

Additional proposed legislation addresses insurance payment for acknowledgement of NP services. Assemblyman Gottfried and Senator Duane have initiated the Reimbursement Assurance Bill (2009), which will assure that health plans do not deny reimbursement for services rendered by NPs acting within their lawful scope of practice. The Access Protection Bill (2010), also by Gottfried and Duane, will prohibit health plans from excluding NPs from their provider networks and to insure that reimbursement rates are reasonable.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.