The role of nursing practice in medicine has been discussed and altered over the past few years. Once this role seemed to be established as being a communicator between a patient and a doctor, it has acquired a series of new responsibilities that require enhanced competence level. In order to facilitate doctors’ practice, nurses have been given an opportunity to legally prescribe medicine while consulting the management. However, for the sake of safety, a nurse has to display enough theoretical and empirical skills to have the ability to prescribe a certain type of medicine, with the range of capabilities gradually expanding (Maier, 2019). Having obtained a sense of autonomy, nurses are still quite dependent on the doctors in terms of education and job delegation.
Once incomplete or unclear, a job description can become one of the major barriers in terms of advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) competence. While having more responsibility than a traditional nurses’ job description presupposes, prescribing nurses are hardly aware of their position in the workplace (Hopia, Karhunen, & Heikkilä, 2017). Another stumbling point for advanced nursing practice concerns inadequate treatment plans, as the overall healthcare system is not equipped with the data collection. If present, such a platform would not make prescribing nurses constantly consult with doctors in order to see the previous prescription notes for a certain patient. Finally, the absence of care plans leads to increased demand in defining the communication patterns between nurses and doctors to secure efficient healthcare. Since unsystematic communication interferes with the overall quality of treatment, the establishments’ administrations should develop a proper consultation scheme that would affect neither the relations within staff nor the quality and consistency in treatment.
References
Hopia, H., Karhunen, A., & Heikkilä, J. (2017). Growth of nurse prescribing competence: facilitators and barriers during education. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 26(19-20), 3164–3173.
Maier, C.B. (2019). Nurse prescribing of medicines in 13 European countries. Human Resources for Health, 17(95).