A Bachelor's Degree as a Requirement for Medical Practice The purpose of this article is to illustrate the high demand for baccalaureate degrees in nursing and explain why that level of education is required in the system healthcare today. Nursing is one of the few professions where there are multiple entry points to practice medicine. Furthermore, one of the biggest discrepancies is the fact that, regardless of the level of education a nurse may have, he or she is treated the same as other nurses with more or less high degrees of education. This article will highlight the discrepancies regarding training in the nursing profession and attempt to evaluate why the baccalaureate degree in nursing (BSN) should be the most basic level of education needed to practice medicine. The idea of ​​multiple levels of entry was traced back to World War II with the inclusion of the diploma and associate degree in nursing (ADN). These programs were included in the nursing field to make up for the shortage of nurses in the field after the war ended. (Taylor, 2008) While this may have been a useful inclusion for the time, these levels of education are no longer a good fit and education for the current moment. As Taylor points out: “Nurses trained at the bachelor's level demonstrate a significant difference in competence compared to nurses with associate degrees” (Taylor, 2008, p.612). This means for ADN nurses that they are not as well trained as BSN trained nurses. One source of this problem is the current training and lack of continuing education in ADN trained nurses. ADN programs do not require as much in their training as BSN-prepared nurses receive. Furthermore, ADN...... middle of document ...... p.612) If this is to change, then the profession must become more adaptive to the needs of the patients and institutions with which it works. The first step towards this goal is to define a precise level of initial training for healthcare. At that point, the need for the BSN program as a starting point for good and competent nursing will be recognized. Works Cited Altmann, T. K. (2011). Registered nurses returning to school for a nursing degree: Issues emerging from a meta-analysis of research. Contemporary nursing: a journal for the Australian nursing profession, 256-272. McEwen, M., Pullis, B., White, M., & Krawtz, S. (2013). Eighty percent by 2020: The present and future of RN to BSN education. Journal of Nursing Education, Taylor, D. (2008). Should entry into nursing practice occur with a baccalaureate degree? AORN diary.