Independent Nurse: Practical Prescribing

December 20, 2008 by admin 

The Primary Care Trust (PCT) in which I work, has recently decided that general practices (GPs) should be responsible for producing their own Patient Group Directions (PGDs). Several GPs have suggested that they use Patient Specific Directions (PSDs) or practice protocols (as opposed to PGDs) to cover nurses for the administration of vaccines. Is this legal?

Practice protocols alone will not cover a nurse to supply and/or administer medicines (e.g. vaccines) to patients. A PSD or a PGD must be in place.

A PSD can be used to supply and/or administer medicines however; under a PSD medicines need to be prescribed for patients on a named patient basis by a registered prescriber. Therefore, if a list of patients to be vaccinated were produced, and signed off by a registered prescriber, this would be classified as a PSD. However, this would not seem practicable in the case of the administration of vaccines.

PGDs can be used to supply and/or administer a Prescription-only-Medicine (POM). In this instance nurses use their own assessment of patient need without necessarily referring back to a doctor for an individual prescription. Therefore, it would seem appropriate that the GP practices in question, adopt PGDs.

If the PCT is willing to share their PGDs, one way forward would be to get them signed off by the lead GP and a community pharmacist. There may however, be a cost involved for the practice as the pharmacist will need to be paid to review the PGD and draw up any new ones in the future.

Filed under: Practical Prescribing
Tagged:

Comments

Comments are closed.