Exclusive Interview: Family Nurse Practitioner, Peggy O'Donnell

Nurse practitioner Peggy O’Donnell, ANP, BC, MS, RN, always knew she'd go into a caring profession.

"I actually wanted to be a vet when I was a little girl," she says. As a teenager, she was a candystriper. By the time she was working as a nurse's aide, she knew she'd found her calling.

"I was immediately attracted to it," she says. "I was very fortunate in my life to find my niche early."

O'Donnell credits her family for sparking an early interest in nursing. "We have several nurses in my family, so I think there was some kind of chemical attraction to it too, that I was just where I belonged," she says.

Ultimately, however, the choice was a deeply personal one. "It just worked with my personality. It was kind of a natural extension of myself--it flowed for me, it was just who I was."

One of her favorite things about nursing, says O'Donnell, is the opportunity to try out new environments and take on fresh challenges without having to make a complete career change. "Every time I got a little antsy with nursing, I just switched roles," she explains. She's worked in 5 different hospitals, in settings ranging from critical care to the electrophysiology department to the emergency room to camp nursing. She's coordinated stem-cell transplants, organized clinical trials for anti-arrhythmic drugs, and provided expert opinions on several medical-legal cases.

For the past 14 years, however, O'Donnell's been a nurse practitioner in a single family practice. She's not bored yet, she says, and she doesn't anticipate becoming so. "I think it's because family medicine provides me with the diversity that I love so much. We do so many different things--children, adults, women's health--so I get that variety right here and I don't have to go anywhere to get it."

Family nurse practitioners like O'Donnell are responsible for providing a broad spectrum of care. They perform comprehensive and focused physical examinations, including school and sports physicals. They diagnose and treat common acute illnesses and injuries, such as colds and sprains. They provide immunizations and manage chronic health problems such as high blood pressure, diabetes or depression. When necessary, they order and interpret diagnostic and laboratory tests or provide referrals to specialists.

Family nurse practitioners also educate and counsel patients and their families regarding healthy lifestyles and health care options. "The most positive part of my day is the relationship I have with my patients," says O'Donnell, who loves being part of her patients' lives from childhood to old age. She often treats multiple generations and extended households, sometimes providing care for as many as four generations within a single family.

A New Yorker born and bred, O'Donnell is enthusiastic about the popularity of nurse practitioners on Long Island. "This is a very doctor-dense area, so it's not like people don't have an option. It's not an under-served area where the only provider you can get is a nurse practitioner." People who come to the family practice to see a nurse practitioner, O'Donnell says, do so because "we are their practitioner of choice."

But it wasn't always that way. In her decade and a half as a nurse practitioner, Peggy O'Donnell has witnessed--and influenced--a shift in public and medical perceptions of the nurse practitioner role. "When I first started as an nurse practitioner, I was the only one in my neighborhood. I really didn't have a lot of models to follow, so I sort of created my own."

Now, new nurse practitioners have no shortage of strong role models. But there's still plenty of political progress to be made in expanding the role of nurse practitioners to enable them to help patients more effectively.

In her role as public relations chair of the Nurse Practitioner Association of Long Island, O'Donnell works closely with the Nurse Practitioner Association of New York State. "We do a lot of political work, and our main goal is to try and allow for nurse practitioners to have complete independent practice," she says. This is already the case in 14 states, such as Alaska and California. Regulations for nurse practitioners are determined at the state level, rather than at the national level, so there's quite a bit of variation.

"Some states are stricter than New York and some are more lenient, so we're sort of middle tier in terms of our restrictions," says O'Donnell. "We're working on that and we're making a lot of political progress."

O'Donnell is optimistic about the future for nurse practitioners. The demand for their unique blend of skills will continue to increase, she says, due to factors such as an aging population, a growing need for preventative care, and national health care reform.

"I think nurse practitioners are a perfect fit for what's going to be happening," she says. "There's so many different avenues that you can create for yourself. I think the world's going to be wide open for us."

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