Seacoast Health Provider Offers First NH Nurse Practitioner Fellowship

Tonya Watkins, an nurse practitioner at Lamprey Health Care, works with a patient. Courtesy Photo

Lamprey Health Care, a nonprofit provider with medical centers in Nashua, Newmarket and Raymond, is launching the first nurse practitioner fellowship program in the state. A maximum of three fellows will be selected to participate in the program's first year, with their primary practice being at the Newmarket Center with additional experience working with patients in the more rural and urban centers of Raymond and Nashua. 

Many primary care practices in the state have experienced difficulty recruiting and retaining provider staff in recent years. According to Lamprey Health Care, nurse practitioner fellowship programs can help health providers improve recruitment and retention. 

The goals of this fellowship program are to increase the number of qualified and confident nurse practitioners prepared to practice in primary care, and provide opportunities for fellows to gain skills across the life cycle, in a setting designed to integrate the delivery of primary care and behavioral health. Last year, nurse practitioners at the organization provided over 870 million patient visits.

“While physicians spend time in residency programs as part of their training, nurse practitioners have no such residency program as part of their education,” says Michelle Gaudet, communication manager at Lamprey Health Care. “A nurse practitioner fellowship program will allow them to gain additional experience providing care to patients.” 

The fellowship program will include precepted continuity clinics, mentored clinics, specialty clinical rotations and didactic education sessions.  Clinical rotations will be in areas of high-volume/high-burden/high-risk situations that nurse practitioners most commonly encounter in providing primary care in a community health setting. This may include areas such as Orthopedics, Dermatology, Women’s Health, Pediatrics, Geriatrics, Newborn/nursery, Infectious Disease, Adult Behavioral Health, Child & Adolescent Behavioral Health and Healthcare for the Homeless. Fellows will also attend weekly educational sessions to build competencies in a topic area, and will include problem based learning using case analysis and discussion.