URI_Research_Magazine_2012-2013_Melissa-McCarthy

Highly Trained Workforce: vital to Rhode Island economic development

The future of health care in this country is anyone’s guess, with science and technology reshaping medical treatments almost every day and a great divide, politically, over the government’s role in providing health care. But one outcome seems certain – the big need for nurse practitioners is only going to grow. The University of Rhode Island’s (URI) College of Nursing is poised to fill that need in Rhode Island’s workforce. At least this is the view of Denise Coppa, an associate professor of nursing at URI who has spent years fighting for the recognition of nurse practitioners, an elite class of nurses with master’s degrees, who can diagnose illnesses and write prescriptions. Noting that millions of Americans still don’t have health insurance, and that there is a shortage of family doctors nationwide, especially in rural areas, Coppa said nurse practitioners will inevitably be needed to fill the gap. Doctors simply can’t take care of all of the people who need health care, Coppa noted, “There’s plenty of work for all.” Coppa speaks from personal experience. A certified nurse practitioner, as well as the director of URI’s Family Nurse Practitioner Program, she sees patients weekly at the Rhode Island Free Clinic in Providence, which serves people without health insurance, and also the Teen Tot Clinic at Hasbro Children’s Hospital, which provides care for mothers under age 17 and their babies. To some extent, Coppa – and other nurse practitioners in Rhode Island – have to work since state law requires them to provide care eight to 10 hours a week in order to stay licensed. And for Coppa to

teach at URI, she has to stay licensed. The result is a hectic schedule that involves considerable travel between URI’s Kingston Campus and Providence’s inner city, where much of Rhode Island’s medically underserved community reside. Coppa has worked at the Rhode Island Free Clinic on Broad Street in Providence since it opened in 1999. Now, she supervises URI nursing students, who are assigned there, and conducts a faculty practice clinic one day a month. In 2011, the clinic logged 8,000 patient visits, attesting to the need for an array of medical providers, in the city’s health care network. Nurse practitioners pride themselves on treating the whole person, not just the person’s injury or disease, within a framework of health promotion and disease prevention. Coppa calls them “patient advocates.’’ URI launched its nurse practitioners degree program in 1975 and has since expanded it to include concentrations in family health, acute care and elder care. The program in elder care was launched with a $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Coppa was a principal investigator on the grant, which was designed to attract minority and disadvantaged students to the specialty with an educational component that reaches out to these students when they are in middle school and high school. The gerontology specialization meets a demand she has observed in some students who wanted to specialize in elder care but still had to take all of the components of the family nurse practioner’s degree, including, pediatrics, Coppa has said. It also distinguishes URI’s

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