Physicians, Nurses Enhance Different Aspects Of Patient Care, Says Yale Study

A new study by Yale University might guide strategic staffing in healthcare as it suggests that different types of health practitioners contribute to enhanced healthcare quality.

Study in US: A new study by Yale University and Fair Haven Community Health Care found that nurse practitioners, physicians, and physician associates (PAs) all have their unique important roles in health care and their jobs enhance different aspects of patient care quality.

In this study, researchers evaluated how these different health practitioners contributed to the patients' quality care. The study suggested that strategic hiring can help health centers to provide their services in a better manner and it is always better to staff with more physicians.

Senior author Benjamin Oldfield said, “We were initially interested in whether there was a magic clinician ratio between doctors, nurse practitioners, and physician associates that might be associated with the highest quality of care."

“Health centers are extremely important models of care for minoritized populations. If we can improve quality of care in health centers, that will have a significant impact on not only a large number of Americans, but also on a particularly vulnerable group of Americans for whom quality of care is especially relevant to health equity," added Oldfield.

More Details On Yale University Study On Healthcare Practitioners

The research included 791 health centers in their study and evaluated their staffing models. The research team comprised a nurse practitioner, medical doctors and a graduate student. The staffing models of these health centres were divided into five categories - more nurse practitioners than physicians; balanced proportion of physicians, nurse practitioners, and PAs; more physicians than nurse practitioners; large health centers; and a roughly equal proportion of physicians and nurse practitioners. Then, these models were evaluated on 14 measures.

“We found that higher performances on diagnostic-related measures like cancer screening and HIV testing were associated with staffing models with more physicians. But having more nurse practitioners and PAs was associated with better performance on health promotion metrics, such as obesity assessment, healthy eating counseling, and infant vaccinations," said Oldfield.

‘Visual clutter’ affects information flow in brain, says another Yale Study

This study offered a deeper understanding of the visual cortex in the brain and clarified the neural basis of perception. It is about when we see different objects, the visual clutter affects how information flows in the brain.

Anirvan Nandy, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) said, “Prior research has shown that visual clutter has an effect on the target of your perception, and to different degrees depending on where that clutter is with respect to where you’re currently looking. So for example, if I’m asked to read the word ‘cat’ out of the corner of my eye, the letter ‘t’ will have a much greater effect than the letter ‘c’ in my inability to accurately identify the letter ‘a,’ even though ‘c’ and ‘t’ are equidistant from ‘a.’”

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