Acute-Care Nurse Practitioners: ‘Strangers in a Strange Land’

In 1961, Heinlein described a "stranger" from another planet struggling to comprehend and integrats the cultural idiosyncracles of earthlings in his adopted land. One could compare that situation with what confronts acute-care nurse practitioners (ACNPs) as they embark into the practitioner’s world of acuta care. Rather Irian embrace the expensive and fragmented patient-care world through coIlaboration with its "strangers," ACNPs would benefit from clinging to elements of their own native nursing culture and become “nesters” rathet than "perchers" in the quest for improved health care.