Transition into an Emergency Nurse Practitioner: a sharing of self-reflection

The role of the Emergency Nurse Practitioner (ENP) has been established in other countries for a few decades, such as the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States where it has developed rapidly in these countries. The concept of the nurse practitioner is to empower those nurses who have a sound clinical base and specialty skills to enable them to make autonomous judgements and decisions regarding patient care. Evidence shows that the expanded role enables greater continuity and consistency in the delivery of "holistic care". Moreover, the ENP service also helps the accident & emergency department to be more effective in its use of available nursing and medical resources. In view of the situation in Hong Kong, because of the unsatisfactory primary health care system, health care providers in emergency care have to deal with huge numbers of patients with minor illnesses and injuries. Patients in this category have to wait for long periods to see a doctor. So the development of the role of ENP for the management of minor injury would be a good option to better utilise departmental manpower to meet patient needs. The author has finished training for minor injury in UK which prepared emergency nurses to take up the ENP role in accident & emergency departments. In this article, the author will share her ENP training experience in the whole process of learning.