Family Nurse Practitioner

Abstract
The issues of patient safety and the increasing scope of family nurse practitioners in medical practice have been dealt with in this paper. National Patient Safety Guidelines are an important tool to help standardize patient safety procedures. The role of the family nurse practitioner in helping patients is unquestionable and they are the cornerstones of modern medical practice.
Keywords: Patient safety, NPSG, Family nurse.

Introduction
The role of a family nurse practitioner is quite similar to the role performed by yesteryears family physicians that could treat everyone in the family beginning from the grandfather to the newborn. Today’s family nurse comes with in-depth knowledge of medicine and is board certified. The responsibilities that have to be fulfilled by such a practitioner embrace health as a way of living and they focus on both treatment and prevention. In recent times, with transitional care gaining widespread acceptance the family nurse practitioner is being granted more decision-making authority although in certain states they are still under a physician’s supervision. The National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs) were put forward by the joint commission for the first time in 2002. The aim of introducing these goals was to deal with patient safety issues and specify certain prerequisites for accreditation (Fairman et al., 2011).
Discussion
The 2015 NPSG’s provide great scope for a family nurse practitioner to improve patient care and also places …