hi all, im currently undertaking my ind/sup nurse prescribing training. i work as the shared care nurse for the local specialist drugs services/pct.

i really am most confused as to what i can prescribe (when qualified) for my clients. i know that nurses cannot prescribe CD's independantly, but cannot find anything that says we can do so as supplementary prescribers under a cmp. yet it looks as though many nurses working in this field are doing so

any authoritative documents you could point me too that says we can do this please? or have i misunderstood what is going on and in fact none of you are prescribing methadone or subutex?

many thanks in advance jon

the law changed last year (april 14th I think). There is a link to the legislation somewhere on this forum. This allowed controlled drugs to be prescribed by supplimentary prescribers under the supervision of a doctor.

thanks jim, ive trawled through the various threads but can only see third party mentions of "having a letter from the doh", or links to the nurse-prescribing website which is rather poorly written so nigh on impossible to search through

what im after is a doh/ho link that i can then print off to prove (to myself more than anyone) that i will be able to prescibe cd's for the purposes of drug dependancy.

many of the doh/ho links contained within this forum are broken, presumably due to the gov's irritating methods of indexing their webpages

even searching on the two gov sites has proved to be futile

i suppose the next 5 months of my training will give enough time to find the relevant info

sorry ignore me, im being blonde

have now found (quite simply??!) what i was looking for

thanks again

for interest:

the changes as jim statsed

because I am such a fantastic moderator I had just tracked down the link for you. However you've got there yourself, but there's no harm in posting it anyway. This is the actual legislation, you've posted the DH summary I think.

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2005/20050271.htm

Jon,
Feel free to get in touch with me i've been prescribing since last May any help I can give you I will.
my e mail is submis009@gp-c85009.nhs.uk
If you mail me i'll drop you my phone number.
regards

Simon

Feel free to read my article on substance misuse supplementary prescribing in the nursing Times on 21/2, and my CMPs are on CMPonline if you want to look at them.

Oh and Jim we don't have to prescribe under supervision of a doctor; the doctor agrees the CMP and its reviewed at least annually!

I know. I was just trying to remember the wording of the original legislation. I meant supervision in a very very loose sense.