Just What the Nurse Practitioner Ordered: Independent Prescriptive Authority and Population Mental Health

Diane Alexander and Molly Schnell

No WP-2017-8, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Abstract: We examine whether relaxing occupational licensing to allow nurse practitioners (NPs)?registered nurses with advanced degrees?to prescribe medication without physician oversight is associated with improved population mental health. Exploiting time-series variation in independent prescriptive authority for NPs from 1990?2014, we find that broadening prescriptive authority is associated with improvements in self-reported mental health and decreases in mental-health-related mortality, including suicides. These improvements are concentrated in areas underserved by psychiatrists and among populations traditionally underserved by mental health providers. Our results demonstrate that extending prescriptive authority to NPs can help mitigate physician shortages and extend care to disadvantaged populations.

Keywords: C-sections; Disability insurance; Medically underserved areas; Mental health; Nurse practitioner; Population (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I13 I14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2016-12-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://chicagofed.org/~/media/publications/workin ... 17/wp2017-08-pdf.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Just what the nurse practitioner ordered: Independent prescriptive authority and population mental health (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedhwp:wp-2017-08

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lauren Wiese ().