Nurse Prescribing due to Government Policy Directives - Essay Example

The government also around this time, introduced supplementary prescribing, whereby nurses and pharmacists would be able to prescribe medicines to patients after an initial assessment by a doctor or dentist had taken place.  This was thought to be very beneficial to nurses especially when working with patients with asthma, diabetes, and mental illness.  With independent and supplementary prescribing, the Government pledged that by 2004, over half of all nurses would be able to prescribe medicines. (DoH, 2002).  Due to the increase in numbers of nurses prescribing and the future forms of health provisions, a systematic review on the effectiveness of nurse prescribing will be undertaken. This will focus on the cost benefits to the NHS and what patients and other health care professionals’ views of nurse prescribing are.

Objectives: This review aims to evaluate the impact and effects of nurse prescribing to date and to highlight areas of further research, which may be needed.  The review will provide a summary of the current state of knowledge into nurse prescribing, to hopefully inform policy and practice and identify areas of need and shall rely upon nurse prescribing literature published from, 2000 until the present.  Literature from other countries will not be included.

included Systemic Cochrane review

Search Strategy: The search strategy for this review complied with Cochrane standards.  To obtain the literature electronic databases were searched, using key words keywords of nurses prescribing).  The databases searched were CINAHL, MEDLINE, EMBASE, SERFILE, Oxford Journals Online, Jstor, ProQuest, ABI Inform, and Academic Search Premier. 

Selection Criteria:  Articles published from 2000 onwards and whose methodological approach was both clearly stated and appropriate were deemed suitable for inclusion, providing that they were both scholarly and peer-reviewed.  Another criterion for inclusion was article focus as the reviewer had, early on decided on the imperatives of the equal representation of the identified four measures: patient opinion, nurse opinion, doctor opinions, on and impact on cost.   As for final determination regarding inclusion, article quality was assessed.