Methodology for a six-state survey of primary care nurse practitioners

Background

Primary care practices employing nurse practitioners (NPs) can play an important role in improving access to high quality health care services. However, most studies on the NP role in health care use administrative data, which have many limitations.

Purpose

In this paper, we report the methods of the largest survey of primary care NPs to date.

Methods

To overcome the limitations of administrative data, we fielded a cross-sectional, mixed-mode (mail/online) survey of primary care NPs in six states to collect data directly from NPs on their clinical roles and practice environments.

Findings

While we were able to collect data from over 1,200 NPs, we encountered several challenges with our sampling frame, including provider turnover and challenges with identification of NP specialty.

Discussion

In future surveys, researchers can employ strategies to avoid the issues we encountered with the sampling frame and enhance large scale survey data collection from NPs.