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USAHS focuses on providing the best and more appropriate academic and financial aid counseling throughout the admissions process. Whether applying to a first-professional, campus based program or a post-professional distance program, an assigned Enrollment Advisor is available to assist you from application to acceptance.
Nurse practitioners and physician assistants are advanced healthcare practitioners with similar responsibilities, such as diagnosing illnesses and prescribing medications. However, their training and paths toward certification differ in significant ways. This blog post unpacks the key differences between NPs and PAs to help you determine which career path best aligns with your goals.
What Is a Nurse Practitioner?
A nurse practitioner (NP) is a licensed clinician who provides comprehensive healthcare to patients of all ages. An NP can work in virtually any healthcare setting, diagnosing patient conditions and prescribing medications. As of October 2022, nurse practitioners have full practice authority in 27 states, meaning that they can practice Read more
USAHS focuses on providing the best and more appropriate academic and financial aid counseling throughout the admissions process. Whether applying to a first-professional, campus based program or a post-professional distance program, an assigned Enrollment Advisor is available to assist you from application to acceptance.
Nurse practitioners (NPs) and medical doctors (MDs) spend their days making a difference in people’s lives. Providers in both professions are dedicated to treating patients’ illnesses and injuries with the best available science and acute care techniques. In the U.S. healthcare system (depending on the state), both can serve as primary care provider .
The main difference between a nurse practitioner and a doctor is that NPs undergo less training than MDs—so their responsibilities differ. This blog post outlines the main differences between the education and job description of a nurse practitioner vs. doctor to help you decide which career could be right for you.
What is a nurse practitioner? A nurse practitioner is a nurse who is focused on providing evidence-based, empathic care to patients. Not only do es this type of advanced practice nurse treat acute and chronic conditions—they also focus on preventive and holistic care.
What do nurse practitioners do ? The typical responsibilities of nurse practitioners may include : 1
In states where nurse practitioners have full practice authority, they are able to act as primary care providers. In fact, according to the American Association of Nurse Practitioners , 89.7 percent of NPs are certified in an area of primary care, while 69 percent actually deliver primary care. The section “ Why We Need Nurse Practitioners ,” breaks down why this is important.
Nurse practitioners and medical doctors share many of the same responsibilities. In 22 states and Washington D.C., NPs have full practice authority, which means they can evaluate patients, order and interpret diagnostic tests, create and manage treatment plans, and prescribe medications—all without physician oversight. In the remaining states, nurse practitioners have reduced or restricted practice, which means they must have a medical doctor sign off on certain patient care decisions. 2
To become a nurse practitioner and especially to become a primary care physician , you must undergo notoriously rigorous schooling . However, both career paths are also extremely rewarding, and whether you decide to pursue nursing school or medical school, you will be working to improve the lives of others.
One advantage of becoming a nurse practitioner is that students are more easily able to keep working while earning their nursing practitioner degree . Particularly with online graduate nursing programs, it’s very possible to hold down a job while getting your doctoral degree or master’s degree, as online learning programs offer greater flexibility.
In order to become a nurse practitioner, you need to complete the following requirements:
Doctors spend more time in school than nurse practitioners: They attend a four-year medical school, then complete an accredited residency training program. Depending on the area of specialty, the residency takes at least three years. 3 The steps to becoming a medical doctor include: 4
Both nurse practitioners and doctors can specialize or even sub-specialize in a particular area. Nursing specialties tend to be slightly different than those for MDs. For example, a nurse practitioner may specialize in women’s reproductive health and childbirth as a women’s health nurse practitioner (WHNP) or as a family nurse practitioner (FNP) 6 , whereas a physician would specialize in obstetrics and gynecology as an OB-GYN.
Common Nurse Practitioner Specialties
Physicians typically work in private offices, as well as group practices, clinics, and hospitals. 7 Doctors also work in academia and for the government.
Nearly half of nurse practitioners work in the offices of physicians. 8 About one-third work in state, local, and private hospitals. NPs also work in outpatient care centers, educational services, and the offices of other healthcare practitioners.
U.S. News & World Report ranks the profession of nurse practitioner as #4 and physician as #5 in its 2020 Best Healthcare Jobs list .
The demand for nurse practitioners is growing rapidly. Employment growth is projected to grow 28.2 percent between 2018 and 2028, with an estimated 53,300 jobs being added during that period. sup9 In 2019, the median base salary for full-time NPs was $115,800 . This is significantly higher than the median base salary for RNs, which was $73,300 in 2019 .
The estimated growth rate of physician employment is much lower than that for nurse practitioners, but still above average at 7 percent, with an estimated 55,400 jobs being added between 2018 and 2028. (This reflects the fact that physicians greatly outnumber NPs, at 756,800 vs. 240,700 in 2018.) The BLS says that in 2019, the median annual wage for physicians and surgeons was equal to or greater than $208,000 .
In 2019, the Association of American Medical Colleges projected that the United States will see a shortage of nearly 122,000 physicians by 2032 . Since the U.S. population is growing and aging, and as population health issues like obesity and tobacco use are addressed so that people can live longer, the demand for physicians is growing faster than the supply. sup10
It’s possible that nurse practitioners, who can deliver primary care of equal quality at a lower cost than physicians, will help close this gap. Inflexible care models that rely on physicians to deliver primary care are contributing to the fact that a growing number of patients lack access to primary care. sup11
It has long been the vision of nurse practitioners to close this gap. In 1965, assistant professor of nursing Loretta Ford and pediatrician Henry Silver developed the pediatric nurse practitioner role (PNP) at the University of Colorado, suggesting that this role could “bridge the gap between health care needs of children and families’ ability to access and afford primary health care.” sup12
Choosing between a career as a nurse practitioner vs. doctor largely depends on your personal and professional goals, as both roles are highly rewarding positions in healthcare.
The University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences (USAHS) offers Master of Science in Nursing (MSN), Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP), and Post-Graduate Nursing Certificates designed for working nurses. Our degrees are offered online, with optional on-campus immersions* and an annual interprofessional trip abroad. Role specialties include Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP), Nurse Educator ,** and Nurse Executive . The MSN has several options to accelerate your time to degree completion. Complete coursework when and where you want—and earn your advanced nursing practice degree while keeping your work and life in balance.
*The FNP role specialty includes two required hands-on clinical intensives as part of the curriculum.
**The Nurse Educator role specialty is not available for the DNP program.
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Home » NurseLife » Doctors Vs Nurses: What Are The Differences?


By Sheena Maireen Saavedra, BSN, R.N.
Sheena Maireen Saavedra is a registered nurse since 2007. She is working as a general nurse in Ireland since 2016 but was a nurse in the Intensive Care Unit and Coronary Care Unit when she was in the Philippines. As a person who continually challenges herself to expand her skill set, she ventured into different fields of the medical world, which includes working as a Product Performance Analyst and Quality Analyst in Boston Scientifics Inc, a medical company that manufactures Class III implantable devices such as pacemakers, ICDs, and CRTs. In general, she enjoyed being a nurse as it helped her meet all kinds of people – which impacted her life the most as she listened to their stories of triumph and tribulations. The profession has created avenues for her to make a difference to somebody’s life. This inspired her to write materials, guides and stories that served as sources of inspiration and help to the world around her, in particular to her fellow sisters and brothers of the industry.

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Pop quiz: How does a nurse differ from a doctor?
Answer: If you have lived in the period of our fathers like some fifty years ago, it would be something like this – the nurses wore the cap while the doctors wear the smock and the stethoscopes. The doctors are the gods of the medical team and the nurses are there to obediently follow and fulfill the orders of the doctors.
Clearly, the doctors have the upper hand in the whole medical scheme, and nurses just went on day by day with this job description difference without any fuss. Nurses just resolved to have a good laugh with the rat race, and left the idiots to chase it around.
But times are changing and nurses are becoming revolutionized, proving that the fact I mentioned above is now a common misconception. Nowadays, we have Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNAs), Nurse Practitioners (NP’s), and all those post-graduate positions that have given the nurse a job description that is almost at par with that of a physician.
We are stepping out into the wild, per se. We can now handle our patients individually and take control of their entire management of care, with the proper education and certification, minus the physician.
So to answer the question at hand, how do they differ now? Let’s go back to first base and tick out the obvious differences between the two.
Doctors have a lengthier education time while nurses follow a basic baccalaureate scheme to start getting paid work. The said education length will determine and influence the salary of each profession, which would mean to say that the higher the education time, the higher the pay.
On another note, let’s focus on this one objective finding. Doctors have a higher salary than the nurses, mainly because of their education, title, and license. While this may be indulging disparity, that is how the world have went on in the past, and will always be in the future. After all, they took almost two decades to get this license to be able to practice their profession, so I can only imagine the struggle and the sacrifice that the doctors have to endure.
The nurse, on the other hand, has to meet more or less similar educational terms to receive a similar fate as that of the doctor’s, salary wise. Meaning to say, nurses have to gather more master’s degrees and doctorate degrees to get a notch higher than that of a regular nurse. The more degree you have, the better salary you get which is, in a way, just fair play.
As per an article that I read, staff nurses start off with an average starting pay of $39,000 while registered nurses earn an average of $57,000 per year. Advanced practice nurses are among a higher earning group with the CRNA ’s earning the highest and tripling the salary of that of a registered nurse, as high as $157,000 per year. Doctors on the other hand, earn an average of $160,000 to $240,000 per year, starting off if a doctor is a general practitioner up to doctors who are working in emergency areas or in surgery .
Basically, the doctors still take a much bigger responsibility regarding decision making. The license of the doctors, however, differs from a nurse in terms of specialty. Doctors are educated to have a single and linear path towards the specialization that they would want achieve. The license that they would acquire is for one field of practice only, which would mean they would go back to school if they would want to practice another field. On the other hand, the license of a nurse is for everyone, regardless of the case specialty of the patient.
There was a time when the medical team and the industry had experienced a shortage of physicians to meet the influx of patients seeking care. So to better up the game plan, the nurses were given the thumbs up to act as the limbs of the physicians and by that concept, have delegated some of their responsibilities to the nurses. Nurses are giving prescriptions, making a diagnosis , performing procedures, and are maintaining the steady progress of the patient according to specialty (yes, a nurse can choose their specialty nowadays once they decided to pursue a higher career path than that of a regular nurse). But this did not mean that doctors are now being superseded by the nurses. The doctors still have the ability to overrule the nurse’s’ judgment and actions.
Nurses work in set shifts of eight hours for five days in a week or 12 hours in four days in a week while doctors are on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Nurses are more intimate with the patients while doctors barely had time to sit beside the patient to lounge and chit chat with them. Nurses are always there from admission to discharge, while the doctors are being called as the last resort if what the nurses did were no longer sufficient according to our scope or experience and expertise.
So let me bestow the final say, that the importance of nurses are still hidden behind various diplomas and social norms that we give the doctors in this society. But when you ask a common patient, you will be surprised when they will tell you this: “The doctor was the guy who came in to ask me what my complaints were and had left, while the nurse is the one who came in, asked me how my day was, offered me water, rearranged my pillow and gave me a comfortable back rub, and has been my immediate help and ears when all else fails and when I needed someone to talk to.”
As we conferred opinions on this matter, it will boil down to the fact that no one is greater than the other. Our differences in our job descriptions are no longer a relevant gauge. We are a team. Everyone played a different role and the absence of one would be critical. As society provided definitions and divisions of our titles by delegating these differences, we should not forget the fact that society is sometimes blind to some truths.
At this time, to say that nurses are lower than a doctor could bring outrageous reactions , especially from nurses. There is still truth to that statement though as technically, nurses still has to wait for the doctor’s final say on some matters. But we all know that nurses are crucial to the medical team.
Without us, who would carry out the orders of the doctor? How are we made into someone lower than the doctors when we are immediately beside the patient while the doctors are not?
More often than not, some of the newer resident doctors would often seek the expertise and advice of a senior nurse as basically, the senior nurse is wiser in terms of experience and past lessons brought about by past cases. Thus, it is justifiable to place the nurse as someone who is qualified to play proxy for the doctors whenever their presence is not around.
Think about it, one doctor recently made a comment that went viral online. He stated that he chose to be a doctor as he was not brave enough to be a nurse. I salute his comment as he gave a notion that doctors admire and appreciate the existence of the nurse, and for that, I felt grateful.
Now here is a question that needs deliberation, especially if you are standing still in the middle ground between choosing a career as a nurse or as a physician. Basically, if you are in a tight budget, pursuing a career as a doctor would be next to impossible, unless having a scholarship is in your bag. You will have to consider a lot of factors before coming up with a decision as you don’t want to waste time and money for something that you will not like in the long run (read: just like choosing your lifetime partner).
As a nurse, you will act as a liaison between the patient and the physician, while as a physician, it would mean you are the leader of the medical team.
As a nurse, you will be more intimate with your patient as you stay with them for the most part of their medical management, while being a physician would mean having a lot of census in your turf to even consider spending a lot of quality time per patient. Physicians treat the disease, while nurses treat the illness or your experience of the disease.
Then again, nurses turning doctors and vice versa is also becoming a common thing. So it is okay to shift to the other side if the other thing is not satisfactory for you. But whatever you choose, as long as your main intention is for the greater good and for your peace of mind, then by all means just follow your heart.
Let’s not forget that doctors also pay more and spend more of their working years in school than most nurses and that doctors have to pay an overhead at their clinics which is an expense that often puts their annual income lower than a nurse. And because of ahs rules, they often end up working for free. They have hours of no sleep and time away from family. When the clinic closes, they are still there making calls and doing paperwork and they do rotations in the local emergency rooms so they may be doing entire weeks where they are working both clinic and the ED. So the annual salary stated, is a before expenses and not take home.
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Reviewed By: Thomas Uzuegbunem BSN RN
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Have you ever wondered just how different a nurse is from a doctor or whether they have exactly the same roles?
Here, you will find the answer to these questions, which will help you determine which career path is best for you.
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