if those entering the profession are native speakers of English. In this regard, Tomlinson states that nursing is an autonomous profession with its own scope of practice and that many of the tasks required are done independently of physicians. As Tomlinson puts it:
Nurses independently assess patient conditions and needs and initiate care based on those assessments. Nurses do countless things every day that are critical to their patients' survival and well-being without any physician involvement, and indeed, there are large portions of nursing practice that physicians would not be qualified to assess, much less perform (p. 1).
The problem is if medical practitioners are given some accelerated course on the grounds that, given they know medicine, they can easily pick up nursing when, in fact, nursing is not a subset of medicine, then the care they provide to patients can be of considerably lower quality. Moreover, if they think that they are engaging in the same practice as medical practitioners, they can easily misinterpret the tasks they are assigned by making decisions nurses should not make and/or
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