The Future Includes Nurse Practitioner Models of Care in the Long-Term Care Sector

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the long-term care (LTC) sector hard, illuminating long-standing deficiencies. The pandemic revealed the consequences of years of inattention to the many challenges facing nursing homes, including lack of access to primary care providers (PCPs)—physicians or nurse practitioners (NPs)—both of whom bring a complementary skill set to the LTC sector. Although multiple studies have focused on the practices of NPs,1 there is limited evidence examining physicians’ practice patterns in nursing homes; however, a recent study suggests that nursing home physicians were more likely to be aged ≥70 years than non–nursing home physicians and full-time nursing home physicians were less likely to take part in innovative delivery models, than occasional nursing home physicians.