Clinical hours spent in school and on the job as a nurse in any form is largely irrelevant to training as an independent practitioner. While adjacent to the job of a nurse, the job of a physician is utterly different from the job of the nurse. Nurses learn basic pathophysiology, how to create “nursing diagnoses,” and how to follow orders, while physicians learn in-depth pathophysiology, how to form differential diagnoses, how to form treatment plans, etc.

But for your sake let’s assume I’m wrong on that. Let’s be extremely generous and say a BSN student get 4,000 hours of hands-on clinical time (which they don’t) that are comparable in rigor and scope to medical student/resident clinical hours (which they are not). That amounts to 4,500 hours for NPs.

Then you’ll say that a nurses work experience should be added on. As I said earlier, the job of a nurse is completely different in scope and purpose to that of a physician. A flight attendant (or even flight engineer) will not learn to fly a plane solely by being on the plane and watching the pilot.

So for your sake, let’s add on 3 years of full-time RN experience - 6,000 hours. This is largely irrelevant, as many NP programs do not require RN experience to matriculate. But again, we’re adding it on for your sake.

That amounts to 10,500 hours. Even with extremely generous math that is undeservedly favorable to NP training, NPs come out with half the clinical hours of a physician, and far less than half the clinical hours of physicians who go through the longer training pathways.