This research examines the concept of marketing nursing services to health care consumers. Such marketing occurs in the contemporary period in the name of both health care institutions and by independent nurse practitioners.
The growing need for home health care services is one area in which the opportunity for marketing nursing services exists (Keating & Kelman, 1988, pp. 56-58). Another contemporary trend is toward ambulatory treatment, as opposed to treatment an a in-patient in a hospital (Stockwell, 1994, pp. 5-17). Many hospitals have or are establishing clinics managed by professional nurses to provide much of this ambulatory care. These clinics, which are established both within hospital facilities and in communities, offer another avenue for the marketing of nursing services to consumers. The free-standing clinic managed by a nurse practitioner is yet another avenue through which nursing services are being marketed to consumers (Soehren & Schumann, 1994, pp. 123-127). The nurse-managed clinic, whether under institutional control or under the control of a nurse practitioner, represents the greatest opportunity for the marketing of nursing services to consumers.
The role of the nurse practitioner has been evolving from a medical to a nursing orientation since the inception of role in 1955 (Thibodeau and Hawkins, 1994, pp. 205-218). As a result of the combination of factors (increasing costs of health care, changing societal values, advances in treatment therapies, and many others), the delivery of health care services in the United States is undergoing rapid and important change. One of the more significant of the changes occurring involves the direct delivery of health care services by non physician health care professionals. There exists both substantial support for this trend, as well as substantial opposition to it (Hupcey, 1993, pp. 181-185). Nurse practitioners and clinical nurse specialists are among the mo...