Extending Independent Nurse Prescribing and the PPA

On 4 May 2001, Ministers announced their intention to extend independent nurse prescribing to enable more nurses, after a period of training, to prescribe a wider range of medicines for a broader range of medical conditions:

• Minor injuries, such as hay fever or ear infections.
• Health promotion, such as providing vitamins for women
• planning pregnancy.
• Palliative care.
  

Plans to extend the scope of nurse prescribing will come into effect from April 2002. The Government will be spending £10 million to help train 10,000 nurses to prescribe a wide range of drugs that have previously been off limits, including 9 oral antibiotics.

Current nurse prescribers (23,000) will continue to be able to prescribe from the existing Nurse Prescribers' Formulary (NPF) and many may wish to undertake further training.

Further information on nurse prescribing, including the full list of prescription only medicines which will be prescribable by nurses, can be found on the Department of Health website at: www.doh.gov.uk/nurseprescribing.

PPA Strategy

Our strategy supports a two-stage approach to the nurse prescribing extension.

First Stage

In the first stage we will implement changes to our systems to cater for April 2002 dispensed prescriptions, which will allow:

• The production of personalised nurse prescription forms (which will also be annotated with the formulary the individual nurse is qualified to prescribe from).
• The capture of prescription data.
• Reimbursement to dispensing contractors for items listed in the Nurse Prescribing Extended Formulary (NPEF).

A pharmacist should not knowingly dispense a product if the prescriber is not qualified to prescribe it. The PPA have been charged by the DH to implement changes that will continue to result in out of formulary prescriptions being disallowed for payment and returned to the dispensing contractor e.g. a product is from the NPEF formulary but the nurse is not qualified to prescribe from this.

Second Stage

In the second stage the PPA will implement changes to our Information Services. These will be implemented in parallel with those changes required as a result of 'Shifting the Balance of Power within the NHS'.

The PPA are currently in discussion with the Department of Health and other users of PPA Information Services regarding their requirements as a result of the extension to nurse prescribing. It is anticipated that these requirements will be agreed and implemented for nurse prescription forms prescribed and dispensed in October 2002 (information available December 2002 onwards).