Extra powers for nurses 'dangerous'

Plans to allow thousands more nurses to prescribe medicines were described as "dangerous" today by the editor of a leading medical journal.

Writing in the Lancet, Dr Richard Horton said the rate at which nurse-prescribing was being implemented held "grave dangers".

A total of 23,000 nurses in the UK are currently allowed to prescribe a very restricted range of drugs.

From this spring 10,000 more nurses started learning how to administer a much wider range of about 150 prescription-only medicines.

The first supplementary nurse-prescribers should be qualified by the end of the year.

But Dr Horton warned that if the policy was carried through "the UK will be embarking on a dangerous uncontrolled experiment".

He added: "Nurses are being manipulated, under the guise of providing quicker and more efficient access to health care to fill the gaps left by too few doctors.

"Prescribing is not a major advance in professional status for nurses. It is merely redrawing the boundaries of a profession to serve an acute political problem, with little regard for the impact it will have either on nursing or the care of patients."

Dr Horton said even doctors sometimes made mistakes when they prescribed. To extend the burden of risk so quickly was "reckless".

If prescribing rights were extended to all drugs in the British National Formulary, nurse training would become more like doctors training.

Mark Jones, primary care policy adviser at the Royal College of Nursing, rejected Dr Horton's comments.

"It's a bit of a simplistic analysis to say every nurse should have access to the BNF," he said.

"Our line for the last 15 years has been that nurses who are specialists in their own practices should have access to the medicines they have experience in.

"We would expect nurses to be prescribing within the limits of their own competence as determined by the needs of their patients and employers."

He dismissed the suggestion that nurses were being "manipulated. "It was our idea before the Secretary of State ever thought about it," he said.

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