Clinical Nurse Specialists & Nurse Practitioners
Nurse Practitioners
Canadian Nurse Practitioner Initiative
As part of its commitment to provide better access to primary health services, the federal government created the Primary Health Care Transition Fund in 2004. It helped support the Canadian Nurse Practitioner Initiative (CNPI), which had an 18-month mandate to develop a pan-Canadian framework to help integrate the nurse practitioner (NP) role into Canada’s health-care system. CNA was the sponsoring organization for this initiative.
In June 2006, CNPI published Nurse Practitioners: The Time is Now, a report containing 13 recommendations to integrate NPs into health care. The CNPI then produced The Way Forward Plan: Committing to Action to map out the next steps required to implement the recommendations so that CNPI’s vision for the NP role could become a reality. The recommendations address seven strategic areas: legislation and regulation; practice; health human resource planning; education; strategic communications, change management and social marketing; evaluation; and governance.
Some provinces and territories have worked with the recommendations, with some success. But there is still no national coordinated effort. And no information has been gathered nationally to determine the success of implementing the report’s recommendations.
Implementation of the recommendations
Four years after the CNPI recommendations, CNA published Recommendations of the Canadian Nurse Practitioner Initiative: Progress Report. Funded in part by Health Canada’s Office of Nursing Policy, this report was written from a pan-Canadian perspective and reflects consultations with key stakeholders on the status of each CNPI recommendation. Information from the consultation process was compiled in the report to identify successes and variances in each jurisdiction and to identify priorities for the integration of the NP role in Canada.
Updated: June 28, 2011
