Walter Cronkite critiqued America’s health care system as “neither healthy, caring, nor a system” in 1993. Thirty-two years later, the U.S. health care system continues to flail. In clinical settings across the country, especially those in rural and other underserved communities, shortages of registered nurses hamper the quality-of-care patients and families receive.

About 30,000 new advanced practice nurses — those prepared in master’s and doctoral programs — will be needed each year through 2032 to meet the challenges of people living longer with increasingly complex health and social needs.

Remarkably, it is at this moment in time that the current administration decides that advanced practice nursing is not a profession. The Department of Education has proposed to remove advanced

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