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Nurses seek regulatory relief from lawmakers

Charleston Gazette photo by Kenny Kemp More than 200 nurses and their supporters march from the West Virginia Culture Center to the Capitol for Wednesday’s Nurse Unity Day.
Charleston Gazette photo by Kenny Kemp
More than 200 nurses and their supporters march from the West Virginia Culture Center to the Capitol for Wednesday’s Nurse Unity Day.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Advanced-practice registered nurses from across West Virginia waited in a small committee room in the state Capitol for the second consecutive day Tuesday, hopeful that the Senate Health and Human Resources committee would forward a bill that would expand their ability to do their jobs without the limitations and oversight they have actively fought for the past eight years.

The committee meeting was canceled, as it had been on Tuesday, but APRNs like Beth Baldwin, chairwoman and vice president of the West Virginia Nurses Association, are eager to move forward with Senate Bill 516, a compromise bill that would expand the prescriptive power of APRNs, establish their own governing board and allow them more freedom to treat patients by eliminating certain procedural hurdles. SB 516 was introduced after SB 21, a more expansive version favored by the WVNA, was killed in committee last month.

“For the past eight years, we have been working to remove barriers for those professionals to be able to practice to the full extent of their education and training,” Baldwin said. “We just want it to come to a vote. We want to move this issue forward, and we want to start chipping away at the barriers.”

The meeting was rescheduled for Thursday.

The APRN classification in West Virginia includes nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, certified nurse anesthetists and clinical nurse specialists. According to Baldwin, these classes of APRNs are fighting to expand their ability to practice nursing, not medicine, and to meet a need in West Virginia, where a dearth of primary-care doctors and an expanding Medicaid population have created a health-care access problem.

“We believe health care is on a continuum, and nurses start at the nursing health continuum — we do health, wellness, education, disease training, health promotion, and physicians are trained at a system-disease end of the spectrum, and when APRNs train, we come close to the center of the spectrum, and use some of the tools from medicine, but we approach it from a totally different aspect.”

Currently, 19 states and the District of Columbia have lifted the restrictions on APRNs…

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