nurse-practitioner

Or nurse prac·ti·tion·er

[nurs-prak-tish-uh-ner]

noun

1. a registered nurse who has received special training for diagnosing and treating routine or minor ailments. NP

nurse practitioner

noun

1. a nurse who has specialized advanced skills in diagnosis, psychosocial assessment, and patient management and is permitted to prescribe certain drugs

Word History and Origins

Origin of nurse practitioner¹

First recorded in 1975–80

Example Sentences

Dr. Dunbar, a nurse-practitioner who lives in Wallingford, Pa., is younger, at 61, but has coped with caregiving for far longer: Her husband, Jeffrey Draine, 60, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2017.

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Listening in on the phone while a hospital palliative care nurse-practitioner talked to her father about his options, Ms. O’Brien provided a blunt translation to an always blunt man: “Dad, your heart and lungs are done.”

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When the kidney palliative care team — including a nurse-practitioner and a social worker, as well as a consulting nephrologist — met with the man’s wife to discuss treatment, it proposed what is known as a time-limited trial, in which life-sustaining treatment continues for an agreed-on period to see how the patient responds.

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“I’ve definitely seen my patients who were stable returning for tuneups,” said Eloise Theisen, president of the American Cannabis Nurses Association and a geriatric nurse-practitioner in Walnut Creek, Calif. “Their anxiety was worse. Their insomnia was worse.”

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The director of mental-health services was fired this summer, while Crosscut reported a nurse-practitioner supervisor felt pushed into resigning.

Read more on Seattle Times

Related Words

• assistant 
• attendant 
• medic 
• registered nurse 
• therapist