Acute care nurse practitioners in oncologic critical care: the memorial Sloan-Kettering cancer center experience.

Overview

Nurse practitioners (NPs) are increasingly being used to fill the physician-staffing void in intensive care units. This article describes the initiation and role development of our collaborative physician-NP critical care medicine (CCM) program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The challenges that our program encountered with recruiting, training, transitioning, collaborating, communicating, and addressing end-of-life issues are detailed in this article. Finally, we delve into the emotional impact NPs have on this new role and propose future directions to strengthen the CCM NP model. We hope that this descriptive article of the development of our CCM NP group will allow others who are seeking to cultivate their own CCM NP teams to benefit from our experience.