searchers conducted a series of structured interviews with administrators, NPs, PAs, and primary care physicians.
Findings of Parker et. al's (1994) study indicated that NPs, Physician Assistants (PAs), and primary care physicians perform many of the same tasks. The organizational roles played by each collective, however, differed substantially. For example, even where NPs and PAs had their own patient panels, they lacked the overall accountability and responsibility for patient care that was imputed to physicians.
Further, Parker et. al (1994) observed that the occupations utilized different healing paradigms. Although most NPs appeared to conduct fewer technical tasks than most PAs, the nurse practitioners viewed their role more broadly than PAs. In general, the nursing approach of NPs incorporated the medical model's emphasis on physical symptoms and underlying pathophysiology into the broader psychosocial and cultural context in which symptoms occurred. Many NPs viewed their practice as an
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