various clinicians promote healthcare maintenance to their patients and take steps to ensure that their patients engage in this behavior.
The proposed study seeks to answer the following research question: Are patients of nurse practitioners more apt to seek maintenance healthcare than patients of physicians?
The significance of determining an answer to the study's basic research question of whether patients of nurse practitioners are more apt to seek maintenance healthcare than patients of physicians is significant because of the costs to the patient, the patient's family, and the healthcare industry that accrue when patients fail to take action to maintain their bodies in a state of health. As noted by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (2003), the failure of people to seek ongoing routine medical care can result in diseases and/or injuries that could have otherwise been prevented and which, over time, seriously elevate health care costs to the country. If medical clinicians are successful in getting their patients to engage in routine healthcare maintenance, the physical, emotional and financial costs could be greatly reduced (U.S. Preventive Service Task Force, 2003). It is this fact that gives the proposed research importance.
Still another factor that adds to the significance of this study is that there is ongoing debate over the role of the nurse practitioner. Many physicians are somewhat skeptical about the medical efficacy of patients seeing nurse practitioners (MacDonald & Katz, 2002). Indeed, Neale (1999) states that there is a real need for increased collaboration between these two groups of medical practitioners, so that doctors can become more aware of the professional job that is done by NPs and learn that many of their fears are unfounded. Through a comparison of the effect of each of these groups of medical practitioners in terms of whether they have motivated their patients to engage in maintenance he...