More than Medicine: Nurse Practitioners and the Problems they Solve for Patients, Health Care Organizations, and the State

As a nation, we face a health care crisis of cost and personnel. Professional nursing has made the case--to state legislatures, insurers, and health care organizations--that nurse practitioners (NP) are part of the solution.

In More than Medicine, Trotter chronicles the everyday work of a group of NPs working on the front lines of this crisis as they cared for 400 African-American older adults living with poor health and limited means. Trotter describes how these NPs practiced an inclusive form of care work that addressed not only medical problems, but the social and organizational problems that often accompany poverty. In solving this expanded terrain of problems from inside the clinic, these NPs were not only solving a broader set of concerns for their patients; they became a professional solution for managing "difficult people” for both their employer and the state.

Through her account, we discover that the problems found in the NP’s exam room are as much a product of our nation’s disinvestment in social problems as of physician scarcity or rising costs. By focusing on the work of NPs, Trotter both troubles and illuminates the relationship between who we think should solve our problems and what we understand those problems to be.

Other selected publications

2023. “A Dream Deferred. Professional Projects as Racial Projects in US Medicine.” Chapter In the Routledge handbook on the American dream volume ii.

Trotter, LaTonya 2023. “A Dream Deferred: Professional Projects as Racial Projects in US Medicine.” In The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream Volume II, edited by Robert Haubart and Mitja Sardoc. New York: Routledge.

2020. “Church is Important to our clients.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

Trotter, LaTonya. 2020. “Church is Important to Our Clients: Autonomy, community, and Religious expression within a Long-Term Care organization.” The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 49(5):638-655. A pre-publication version received the Betty J. Cleckley Minority Issues Research Award from the American Public Health Association’s Aging and Public Health Section.

2019. “I’m not a doctor. I’m a nurse.” Social Currents

Trotter, LaTonya. 2019. “‘I’m Not a Doctor. I’m a Nurse’: Reparative Boundary-Work in Nurse Practitioner Education.” Social Currents 6 (2): 105–20. A pre-publication version won the 2013 Student Paper Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problem’s Division of Health, Health Policy, and Health Services.

2017. “Making a Career.” Gender & Society

Trotter, LaTonya J. 2017. “Making A Career: Reproducing Gender within a Predominately Female Profession.” Gender & Society 31 (4): 503–25. Winner of the 2018 Society for the Study of Social Problem’s Arlene Kaplan Daniels Paper Award for the best paper on Women and Social Justice.

2015. “The Caring Professional?: Nurse Practitioners, Social Work, and the Performance of Expertise.” Chapter in Caring on the Clock.

Trotter, LaTonya. 2015. “The Caring Professional? Nurse Practitioners, Social Work, and the Performance of Expertise.” In Caring on the Clock: The Complexities and Contradictions of Paid Care Work, edited by Mignon Duffy, Amy Armenia, Clare L. Stacey, and Margaret K. Nelson. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.