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
Dr. Christine E. Fiestas is a Core Faculty member in the Speech-Language Pathology program at St. Augustine University for Health Sciences-Austin campus. She joined the program in the spring of 2020 as an Associate Professor. She received both her Ph.D and M.S. from the University of Texas at Austin in Communication Sciences and Disorders. Her clinical specialty areas are in the assessment and treatment of developmental language disorders from birth through school ages as well as the assessment of reading and fluency disorders. Her lines of research include the assessment and treatment of language and literacy disorders for individuals who are bilingual, multilingual and speakers of dialects which are not mainstream English. Dr. Fiestas was awarded an ASHA multicultural project grant award developing language assessment norms for Hawai’i Creole English and with colleagues she developed the Narrative Assessment Protocol-Spanish which is a language development progress monitoring measure for preschool-aged Spanish speakers. Dr. Fiestas has published research in the areas of dynamic assessment to discriminate children with language impairment from children who are learning English as a second language, assessment techniques which consider typical disfluencies from stuttering-like dysfluencies for bilinguals, bilingual early literacy screening measures and language intervention techniques which will support the transfer of learning across languages for bilingual learners. Dr. Fiestas teaches the Early Language Disorders and School-Aged Language Disorders courses in the SLP-Master’s program.
