Hi
My name is sue and when looking on the net for info about non medical prescribing i stumbled acroos this forum, which i must say is very informative. I completed my prescribing course in Aug 07 and am currently trying to source revised job discriptions that incorporate non medical prescribing within substance misuse.

I was also wondering what banding non medical prescribing nurses have been awarded under afc.

thanks

sue

Hi, AfC doesn't recognise nurse prescribing sadly. I am on 7 but would be on that anyway. There seems to be a lot more of us prescribing these days; I chaired and spoke at a meeting at the RCN last week on substance misuse non medical prescribing and about half of the 30 ish people there are prescribing which is good.

This is a complicated and recurring issue. In my role as lecturer on NMP courses I'm aware of nurses who have had difficulty with this, so we've discussed it at length with local AfC managers, and so far as I can remember what they said, the key points were:

1. If the job description isn't amended, at least get confirmation from a line manager that your role includes prescribing so that there are no liability issues if things go wrong. You can't rely on vicarious liability of the employer unless prescribing is clearly part of your role.
2. The difficulty with AfC arises partly because there is a distinction between what a job requires and what a person happens to have. The AfC position is that if a job requires prescribing, it will be in the grading assessment in the first place as part of the clinical responsibility metric; if a postholder becomes a prescriber, that may be valuable but it doesn't change the actual requirement of their job. However, our officer conceded that where an appraisal had resulted in an agreed action to take a prescribing course, it was wrong that this was not acknowledged. She just couldn't think of a way of doing it within AfC. Obviously the nurse is better trained and may now be able to apply for a better job and progress that way, but in the interim the best suggestion she had was that the line manager should be persuaded to apply for a variation in the post's banding.

There is quite a bit of useful stuff on the AfC website if you're patient and don't mind reading!