Ask an NP – Differences between FNPs and RNs

00:00 So, as a family nurse practitioner, the three big pillars that kind of separate it are going to be you can assess patients, you can diagnose them, and then you can treat them.

00:10 As a nurse, you receive orders and you follow a treatment plan that someone has already set up for you.

00:15 Yes, you are looking at the patient, you're assessing them, you're making sure everything nothing's really changed, right? You haven't seen anything drastically different.

00:22 You can make recommendations.

00:23 But at the end of the day, you aren't the one that makes the choices pulls in all the data and says, "Hey, we're going to steer the ship in a totally different direction.

00:30 So that's been the biggest thing to adjust to as a nurse practitioner is now you're the one collecting all the data.

00:36 Sometimes that's assessments from nurses, you're pulling in that you're getting labs, you're telling someone, "Hey, this is the diagnosis we're going to run with and here's the actual thing we're going to do to treat it." So you're more steering the ship versus implementing all the things in order to make it navigate the right way.