Introduction
Nurse Practitioners have a plethora of professional duties in their schedules that they are obliged to follow. One of the most important nurses’ responsibilities is to prescribe specific medicaments to their patients, which are intended to heal certain diseases. The following paper will cover and discuss various practice issues of a nurse practitioner as a prescriber.
Discussion
An essential nurses’ professional duty is to prescribe medicine to the patients that are intended to undergo a medical treatment period in a hospital. It would be proper to state that only NP’s with advanced degrees and knowledge are allowed to make drug prescriptions to their patients. Although this procedure is not as complicated as it seems at first, there is a wide range of aspects that have to be considered for the medical treatment’s efficiency and its benefit to a person. However, an NP is required to specify, identify, and distinguish various drugs from one another, as even a minor mistake might have a tremendous impact on a patient’s health (Kroezen et al., 2014). Moreover, it is appropriate to know personal health biases of the patient who needs to take medicine. For instance, a person might have particular issues or allergies to certain substances and medicaments. In this case, these restrictions have to be considered because inappropriate drug preparations might be crucial or lethal to a person seeking help.
Nurses are obliged to acquire a specific diploma, certificate or a license that will give them rights to prescribe medicine to patients because this practice is usually a doctors’ responsibility, as they specialize in various diseases and diagnoses, whereas nurses are obliged to help patients during their healing periods and treat them properly. Nevertheless, if a nurse is allowed to prescribe medicine legally, he or she is required to establish malpractice insurance. “To promote case management, the advanced practice nurse prescriber may order laboratory testing, radiographs or electrocardiograms appropriate… to his or her education, training or experience” (Smith, Latter, & Blenkinsopp, 2014, p. 2510). In turn, it is important for one to be competent in diagnosing various illnesses to prove specific doctor’s conclusions and to make the right decision in choosing medicaments for a patient. Nevertheless, another factor has to be considered during the prescription procedure by a nurse practitioner (Kroezen et al., 2014). This issue lies in one’s awareness of other recommendations to a particular patient because the latter person might not remember all the healing process’s duration and will have an overdose as a consequence of his or her treatment.
Any recipe or conclusion of a nurse practitioner has to be approved by a doctor because these professionals might recommend other medicine that will be more efficient and beneficial for a patient in a particular case. In turn, NP’s are obliged to include names of medications and directions of their usage in the patient’s prescription list. Moreover, businesses ‘ and customer’s addresses have to be present in this document as well to control healing processes or to resolve emerged difficulties.
Conclusion
Only legally authorized and licensed nurses are allowed to make prescriptions and give various recommendations to patients as to their treatment processes. The client’s health record must contain his or her address, the date of prescription, names of the given medications, directions for their implementation, medications’ quantity, nurses’ name, and other contact data. A medication prescription is a tremendous responsibility that is intended to help a patient, but there are many cases of unfortunate outcomes that are essential to consider before prescribing certain medicaments.
References
Kroezen, M., Dijk, L. V., Groenewegen, P. P., Rond, M. D., Veer, A. J., & Francke, A. L. (2014). Neutral to positive views on the consequences of nurse prescribing: Results of a national survey among registered nurses, nurse specialists and physicians. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 51(4), 539-548. Web.
Smith, A., Latter, S., & Blenkinsopp, A. (2014). Safety and quality of nurse independent prescribing: A national study of experiences of education, continuing professional development clinical governance. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 70(11), 2506-2517. Web.