Global Development of Advanced Practice Nurses: Implementation and Barriers=全球進階護理人員的發展 實施現況與瓶頸

Economic development shapes present health-care enterprise and gives a great opportunity for developing the role of advanced practice nurse (APN) . Currently approximately 50 Countries, including Taiwan, have had APNs and most of them just developed this role around 2000. However, APNs are new roles and their practice scopes are different. Barriers to develop the APNs role, especially for nurse practitioners ( NPs), have been identified by International Nurse Practitioner/Advanced Practice Nursing Network as following: titling, educational standards clearly identified scopes of practice and regulations. The purpose of this article is to explore the development of APNs globally and the bottleneck of NPs development