A Calhoun health specialist with Minnie Hamilton Health Care Center has been featured in a special report of US News and World Report. Teresa Ritchie, APRN (Advanced Practice Registered Nurse) has 25 years of nursing experience in home health, obstetrics, and emergency medicine. She has practiced as a Family Nurse Practitioner at Minnie Hamilton since May 2001.
The magazine story discusses the growing gap that separates doctors and patients, and new healers like Ritchie that are stepping in to fill the void.
"Family physicians are getting stressed to the max," says Mary Frank, who is president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, buried under time constraints and reams of paperwork.
US NEWS writers Samantha Levine and Angie C. Marek say nurses are stepping to the front in hamlets like Calhoun County and high-tech hospitals, taking bigger roles.
"When white-haired Harry Curry shuffles into the Minnie Hamilton Health Care Center in rural Grantsville, W.Va., he says he'll see only "his doctor." That's his name for Teresa Ritchie, the nurse practitioner who looks after the 71-year-old at this tiny complex tucked in the Appalachian hills."
"The veteran nurse takes on everything from minor surgery to emergency room crises. Ritchie has admitting privileges at area hospitals, still unusual for a nurse, and can prescribe medication with just a doctor's checkoff."
"When I started out, nurses were not told we could think for ourselves," said Ritchie. But those times are long gone, says US NEWS, with many of the country's more than 2 million nurses taking on jobs that were once the purview of physicians.
"Down in Grantsville, nurse practitioner Ritchie hopes that the research that is going on will not just win more respect one day but will also help her patients with chronic illnesses. In her green cargo pants, black turtleneck (from which hangs her ever present stethoscope), and lug-soled boots, Ritchie ducks from crowded office to examining room to the "extra medicine" supply closet as country music plays on a boombox," says US NEWS.
"She tells Harry Curry she'll go to Wal-Mart and buy him more of the salve he likes to rub on his dry, scaly shins. Then she tells another patient, Delberta Hickman, that it's OK to trust in Jesus to heal her diabetes but that medicine can help, too."
Complete story US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT
Nurses Step to the Front
| 
