Clinical mangament plan and nurse prescribing of patient with urinary tract infection - Essay Example

In terms of the development of nurse prescribing, the progress track and rationale is straightforward; when there is a fundamental need within the healthcare system, someone must step forward to meet that need. Given the demands placed on doctors by increased patient populations and the need to prioritize toward acute or emergency cases, it was a natural solution to begin to utilize nurses and expand their role within the system. As the professionals who have the greatest level of one-on-one contact with the patients, nurses are a logical and necessary extension of the primary care physician.

To simply expand their capability to prescribe medications under a doctor’s supervision is not a great leap forward in terms of logic; particularly given the amount of efficiency it brings to the overall healthcare system. Within the clinical environment, however, there has been conflict within the medical community as the technical nature of treatment modalities has increased and, with a large nursing staff presence, there has been the opening for nurses to take on greater and more difficult medical duties than were previously associated with nursing.

The profession itself has “striven for many years to throw away the handmaiden mantle and get itself [sic] recognized as a profession, independent of doctors” (Brown, Crawford, & Hicks, 2003: 348). The primary issue facing nurses in general—and nurse prescribers particularly—is that many doctors see a nurse’s ability to prescribe medication as an infringement upon their territory. As with any polarizing dynamic, this is an unhealthy situation for the patients. While there are traditional and legal boundaries between the duties and practices of doctors and nurses, it is unnecessary to engage in an outright turf war; only the patients will suffer.

In the UK, there continues to be the development