Poll Results – 110 Practitioners Voted on the name for NPs & PAs

Before we launched Advanced Practice Recruiters as a division of BSM, Inc. we were building the website under the name “Midlevel Recruiters.” However, as traffic started to come in from Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other places that we had began to develop a presence, we had a couple of complaints from Nurse Practitioners regarding the term “Mid-level.” We had represented enough NPs and PAs to know that this term wasn’t accepted by all, but we felt it was the most understood term for non-physician providers.

This being the case we scratched our heads and thought, “what should we call ourselves?” I called some Nurse Practitioner, Physician Assistant, and CRNA friends of mine to ask what they thought. Most of them said they weren’t offended by the term Mid-Level, but that they preferred to be called by their official title, respectively. Well we ruled out the name, “Physician Assistant Nurse Practitioner CRNA Clinical Nurse Specialist Recruiters,” and looked around for more answers.

When we came across the AANP position paper on the term Midlevel, found HERE, and decided that Midlevel Recruiters wasn’t going to work long-term. The position paper recommended the terms “independently licensed providers, primary care providers, healthcare professionals, and clinicians. Out of these we felt the one with the most relevance was “clinicians,” but we quickly learned most  non-practitioners didn’t recognize this term. We ended up deciding on the name, “Advanced Practice Recruiters,” borrowing the term from the title, “Advanced Practice Nurse,” that includes NPs, CRNAs, and CNSs.

To further our understanding on what the community of healthcare professionals thought about this term we included a survey when we launched the new website under the Advanced Practice Recruiters name. To date we have had 110 responses.

 

 

Luckily the term, “Advanced Practitioner,” is leading the way, but surprising to us the term, “Mid-level,” is not far behind. What are your thoughts? Chime in HERE as we hold this survey open until the end of the year 2010.

Perhaps the next survey will be: Physician Assistant or Physician Associate?

Well we respect each role independently. We understand there are different training routes, different scopes of practice, and different specialties. Yet we aim to serve the whole Advanced Practice Community.

Keywords: Mid-level, Midlevel, Nurse Practitioner, Physician Assistant, Clinician, Clinical nurse specialist, Non-physician, non-physicians,