NURSE PRESCRIBING SERVICES IN URGENT CARE CENTRES IN UK

Nurse Prescribing Services in Urgent Care Centres in UK

Abstract

This qualitative study explores how recently qualified nurse prescribers describe, and rate, the safety of their prescribing. Internationally, the costs of drug errors are enormous and they can have serious implications for staff and patients. Nurses are now undertaking extended prescribing practice throughout the UK. Nurse prescribers work across different work settings and although safe prescribing is a priority in all of them, it is essential to ascertain the conditions that foster the highest levels of safety and how nurses can be supported in practice. Thirty-one nurses form the West Midlands area of England agreed to participate in an in-depth interview which sought to elicit their responses to various aspects of their prescribing work. They came from a variety of specialities and from hospital, community and general practice backgrounds. On completion of their training nurses were acutely aware of the responsibility that prescribing imposed on them. Although this awareness was thought to encourage caution and safety, it may also account for the fact that 26% of the nurses (n = 8) had not prescribed since qualifying. Nurses felt that the multidisciplinary team had a vital role to play in supporting their prescribing practice as did collaborative working. It is concluded that those working in specialty areas that are less well-defined in terms of scope of practice (e.g. older adult nursing and learning disability) would benefit in particular from ongoing mentoring relationships with experienced prescribers and the development of individual formularies. Nurse Prescribing Services in Urgent Care Centres in UK

Introduction

In the UK, modernisation of the Urgent Care Centre has intended that services are progressively being supplied in community other than clinic settings. Nurses play a large part in stopping clinic admissions by supplying dwelling care to persons with mostly long-run situation in the community. In the early 1980s, it was proposed to the UK government that doctors be allowed to prescribe medicines inside their scope of perform in order that they could boost get access to to medication and avert service users with chronic illnesses from frequently having to join GP and clinic appointments. Community doctors have now been adept to prescribe from a restricted formulary of medication for over 20 years in the UK and prescribing privileges were expanded to doctors employed in other specialities in 2003.

The figures of healthcare professionals prescribing and modifying medication are now set to increase. The Medicines and Human Use (Prescribing) (Miscellaneous Amendments) Order of May 2006 and affiliated medicines guidelines will endow doctors who have effectively accomplished a doctor unaligned prescribing course to prescribe any permitted surgery, encompassing some Controlled Drugs, for any health status inside their clinical competence. Before these alterations to the legislation, doctors could prescribe medication through two distinct paths, either as an unaligned prescriber from a restricted register in the British National Formulary (BNF) for a particular register of situation, or inside a supplementary prescribing connection (Barber, 2003, ...