Community nurse prescribing is seen as a good thing but nurses don’t like the name and believe the proposed training is too short, according to feedback to the Nursing Council.
Some initial analysis of the 197 responses’ to the Councils registered nurse (RN) prescribing proposals was presented to the weekend’s NZNO College of Primary Health Care Nurse conference in Wellington
Pam Doole, the Nursing Council’s strategic policy manager, shared the summary responses of the 187 submitters who answered the consultation document’s set questions.
The findings did not include the seven medical organisations that made submissions without answering the set questions. Doole said the medical submissions ranged from “extremely supportive” to “semi-supportive” to a few who wanted RN prescribing to only be extended under the government’s proposed delegated prescribing category.
The around 90 per cent of the submitters who did take part in the set questions were supportive of the concept of community nurse prescribing and believed it would benefit patients, said Doole.
But about 70 per cent were not happy with the title ‘community nurse prescriber’ (CNP) and believed it was confusing.
They were also not supportive of the proposed six-day theory and three-day supervised practice training programme for CNPs, with many saying they believed it was too short and some saying it should be at a postgraduate paper level.
The proposed list of prescription medicines that CNP’s could prescribe evenly divided submitters. with about half supporting and the other half raising concerns about the extensive nature of the list and making suggestions about what should or shouldn’t be included.
Doole said one of the problems with the list was that the council was required to include all active ingredients of a medicine, which had prompted concerns like people finding a drug commonly used in ICU on the list as it was a component of anti-diarrhoea medicine. The council was also stymied by not being able to include on the list the suggested strength, the drug’s common name or how the drug was to be taken.
She said the community nurse prescribing had attracted particular support from nurses like public health nurses and school nurses who mostly worked in isolation and did not have easy access to doctors or working under standing orders.
The specialist nurse prescriber proposal had also received very strong support, but likewise, about half did not like the proposed title for the prescribing role. There was also strong agreement that specialist nurse prescribers should be required to work in a collaborative multidisciplinary team and prescribe under supervision for the first six months.
Expecting specialist nurse prescribers to complete a postgraduate diploma in prescribing was widely backed though there was some issues raised prescribing practicums.
Doole said analysis of the full submissions was ongoing and no conclusions had been formed. A full report and recommendations was likely to go to council in probably September.
