Nurse practitioner scope of practice and patient harm: Evidence from medical malpractice payouts and adverse action reports

Abstract

Many states have recently changed their scope of practice laws and granted full practice authority to nurse practitioners, allowing them to practice without oversight from physicians. Physician groups have argued against this change, citing patient safety concerns. In this paper, we use a ratio‐in‐ratio approach to evaluate whether the transition to full practice authority results in harm to patients as proxied by malpractice payouts and adverse action reports against nurse practitioners. We find no evidence of such harm, and instead find that physicians may benefit from the law change in terms of reduced paid malpractice cases against them.