Independent Nurse: Practical Prescribing
January 20, 2008 by admin
As many of you will know, having spent 5 years working at the RCN, I now work as the prescribing adviser with the ANP. It is in the capacity of ANP adviser that I have been asked to contribute to this “Practical Prescribing” column. My work at Reading University and the ANP put me in the privileged position of working in roles which span policy, practice, and research. This column provides a great opportunity for me to feed both research and policy perspective into prescribing practice.
The column aims to provide practical prescribing advice. In each edition of IN I will answer your questions, highlight issues for prescribers, provide helpful suggestions or ‘tips,’ respond to any prescribing guidelines or consultations, and provide pointers to new resources. Being a research boffin, I will, at times, bring in some of our work from Reading University to support these discussions. For example, it’s evident that prescribing offers nursing practice a number of benefits, how can you evaluate or audit your practice taking into account these benefits? How should we be developing nurse-led services? There are still some reservations about prescribing amongst doctors – how can we promote understanding of the prescribing role amongst our medical colleagues?
As you are probably aware, you can enter the on-line prescribing resource centre (including the prescribing forum) via X. Please do post your questions into the forum as I intend to use some of the questions raised, to form a basis of topics for this column. In the next edition of IN I will be looking at the reaction of doctors to nurse prescribing. If you want to contribute please do send any questions to ? or log into the forum.