"Family nurse practitioners (FNPs) really encompass the whole lifespan. We can take care of pediatrics to geriatrics, and that’s how we’re educated and prepared. Adult nurse practitioners (ANPs) focus on just the 18-year-old adult and up. There are also women's health, pediatric, and psychiatric nurse practitioners.

"Then the other big category is acute care nurse practitioners who are usually in hospital and inpatient settings in critical care units where patients are much sicker and their needs are very different from a non-hospitalized patient. They care for those patients just as well. People assume nurse practitioners are in outpatient settings, but they can be found throughout every healthcare setting."

How does the NP approach differ from that of traditional doctors?

"We meld nursing and medicine into this hybrid of a profession. A lot of what we do as nurses, first, is patient advocacy and patient empowerment. We focus on health education and health literacy. As advanced-practice nurses, we bring that to the next level.

"It’s partnering with the patient to set realistic expectations, and it’s taking a holistic approach — whole body and mind. We're not just focusing on a disease process or one particular organ; we’re looking at the person as an individual but also as part of a family and seeing what psychosocial aspects come into play. That complicates things that might otherwise seem easy.

"For instance, high blood pressure is a physiological issue. Theoretically, if somebody has high blood pressure, there are medications to treat it. But if it were really that simple, nobody would have high blood pressure. Where the nurse-practitioner approach comes in is looking at that patient and understanding if there are any barriers to access medication. Can they afford it? Did they hear anything negative about a family member who took it and had a bad side effect? Or maybe they'll take the prescription but not get it filled. All these things are routine parts of how NPs approach patient care.