Should Nurses be Able to Prescribe Basic Medication?

The nursing profession has evolved tremendously since the times of Florence Nightingale, a pioneer of modern nursing. The personnel of this profession have not ceased to hunt for their place within the medical field. Nurses are often given further responsibilities and drug-related activities like prescribing treatments.

In most countries,  prescription is considered to be a medical act, and with that in mind, dispensing medication could be a pharmaceutical act and administration could be a nursing act. On their role in medical prescription, nurses add regard to different health professionals. The literature has shown the active involvement of nurses within the prescription of medicines helps increase and support patient’s access and maintained the best medical care.

Nurses, who area unit additional usually present with the patients than the attending physicians, offer adequate management in quality care and decision upon physicians after they take for it is necessary. Thus, as accountable and competent professionals, nurses will exchange their observations and assessments with doctors. In fact, the interaction between the nurse and also the Dr. Permits the information and skills of each profession to influence patient care in synergism. Indeed, a competent nurse contains a role in designation and proposes applicable treatment. Additionally, the nurse participates within the follow-up of the treatment. This step needs, in some cases, watching the clinical and biological examinations necessary for the detection of the expected adverse effects.

In underdeveloped countries at low-level nurses are allowed to prescribe medicines to patients because they have an insufficient number of doctors to appoint. The nurses have no more knowledge as compare to doctors. Their studies did not follow under the criteria of prescribes medicine But every country, have its own rules. But at international level studies tell us nurses are not allowed to prescribe medicines.

In several countries, particularly in France, medication prescription could be a prerequisite of the doctor. However, this act isn’t done unilaterally by doctors; however, it’s most frequently the conjunction of various factors and actors interacting with the ultimate call that’s the only responsibility of the legal actor. Physicians’ decision-making in medical prescribing is influenced not solely by their own experience and beliefs however conjointly by nurses. From this attitude, a scientific review of the literature for the role of nurses in medical prescription and their influence on the physicians’ call seems necessary

The number of prescriptions issued by independent nurse imposers has up by forty-ninth since new rules permitting nurses to prescribe complicated medicines to patients were introduced last year, in step with a report in Pulse, the newspaper for GPs.

The figures have prompted a row among medical practitioners over whether or not nurses and pharmacists ought to have the proper to impose a large vary of medicine in a very bid to hurry up patient treatment.

Professor Hugh McGavock said: “Nurses’ information of diagnosing is pitiably poor. It takes medical students 5 years to be competent to form a medical diagnosis. Only a country with not enough doctors would go down this cheep line.”

But Dr. Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal Faculty of Nursing (RCN), defended the role of nurses.

He said: “Nurse prescribing has been a historic move for the nursing profession and it’s one in every of the foremost thriving components of the present NHS reforms. Far away from being the matter, academic McGavock suggests, nurse prescribing has established itself to be a crucial a part of the answer in up access to medicines and cutting waiting times for patients.”

Conclusion

The nurses have a necessary role within the administration of medicines and within the follow-up of the drug consequences. Additionally, nurses tend to share the choice relating to prescribing with the doctors through associate degree inter-professional cooperative approach. Nurses don’t have ample information concerning pharmacology and drug management. But they have enough knowledge to prescribe basic medicines and should be.