These Scope of Practice Laws Don ’t Improve Health Outcomes, Serve Mainly as Barriers to Entry

Scope of practice (SOP) restrictions in health care professions are often portrayed as a necessary intervention to protect consumer health and safety. Given how common this argument is, there have been surprisingly few studies trying to determine whether SOP restrictions actually have any impact on such outcomes. A newworking paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature by determining whether SOP laws for certified nurse midwives (CNMs) affect health outcomes. On average, it turns out that the restrictions do not have a significant impact on maternal behaviors or infant health outcomes. Instead, they “primarily serve as barriers to practice and removing these restrictions has the potential to improve the efficiency of the health care system for delivery and infant care.”SOP laws are determined at the state level, and regulate which activities and tasks certain professions can perform within the state. Physicians are generally unaffected, but other health practitioners are —in this case, CNMs specifically. Their level of restriction ranges from states with “no barriers,” where CNMs do not have oversight requirements, to states with “high barriers,” where they have to be under the direct supervision of a physician and may not write prescriptions. In heartenin g news, more states seem to be recognizing the wasteful nature of these laws. The recent trend for this specific case has been a move towards a more relaxed scope of practice environment.  Scope of Practic...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs