About Us

The Coalition for Patients’ Rights (CPR) consists of 35 organizations* representing a variety of licensed health care professionals who provide a diverse array of safe, effective, and affordable health care services to millions of patients each year. These competent, well prepared health care professionals complete years of education in their respective specialties, and have long been recognized at the federal and state levels as qualified and essential contributors to the U.S. health system.

Although they are excellent and indispensable caregivers to a large segment of the U.S. population, these professionals, who are neither medical doctors (MDs) nor doctors of osteopathy (DOs), continually have to fend off efforts by organizations representing MDs and DOs to limit their scope of practice. In the face of organized medicine’s latest divisive efforts to limit these professionals’ abilities to provide the care they are qualified to give, the CPR was formed for the sake of patients—to ensure that the growing needs of the American health system can be met and that patients everywhere have access to quality health care providers of their choice.

A list of professional organizations that have joined the coalition can be found below. “Scope of practice” can be defined as the range of health care-related activities and services which a health care professional is educated, certified or licensed to provide. CPR is committed to advocating for the practice rights of its members for the sake of their patients who rely on them for the many and varied services they provide. Without the contributions of these professionals to patients across the country, and especially to those in rural and medically underserved areas, many patients would be left without essential health care services. The CPR united to prevent this from happening.

* As of January 15, 2008