I couldn't agree more with your concern that so many nurses identify themselves as "just a nurse": just a floor nurse, just a med-surg nurse, just a diploma nurse (Editorial, May). I wonder how much nursing itself is responsible for this self-deprecation.

It seems to me that the sisterhood we embraced in the 1960s has slipped away. Manifest also in horizontal violence in the work-place, our failure to embrace one another's different contributions to nursing and patient care means that many of us continue to feel "less than." I think the term advanced practice nurse (even though I am one) is unfortunate. There is nothing more advanced than to work as a "regular" nurse.

Many years ago, I was a student in the NP program at the University of Virginia. One evening I accompanied a newly minted NP to a meeting of the local district nurses association, where an elderly member of the group greeted us.

"Are you nurses?" she asked, smiling warmly.

"No, we're not-we're nurse practitioners," my colleague almost spat out as she swept by her.

I wonder if there isn't some way we can value one another and stop considering one nursing specialty to be more advanced than another.

Joyce E. Penrose DrPH, CRNP, FNP-BC

Pittsburgh, PA