Nurses: quasi-pharmacists?
November 3, 2010
NURSE practitioners have come
under fire from sectors of the
pharmaceutical community for the
new PBS and Medicare legislation,
which allows them to diagnose,
prescribe and treat patients (PD Mon).
Airing his concern over what he
sees as the ‘concept’ of nurse
practitioners acting as “quasipharmacists”
and “barefoot
doctors”, pharmacist and
pharmacy & drug information
consultant, Ron Batagol, said that
to “add nurse input as well [as
pharmacists and doctors] is simply
to have one health professional
duplicate what the other already does”.
“With regard to nurses advising
on primary care, pharmacists
already provide the full range of
high-quality primary health care
services, albeit, unfortunately, as we
all know, all given without any cost
to the patient or fee to the
pharmacist,” he said.
“The fact is that, nurses, no
matter how comprehensive their
post-graduate courses, simply do
not have the same level of
knowledge and expertise as
pharmacists in all facets of the
therapeutic use of drugs and in
optimum patient medication
management,” he added.
Batacol continued on to say that
whilst nurses are experts in their
own field, they do not have the
“specific professional expertise and
training in medication advice and
management” that pharmacists do,
such as knowledge about fast and
slow codeine metabolisers, the risks
of renal failure and the dangers of
concomitant use of clopidogrel and
omeprazole).
Backing up his argument,
Batagol quoted Prof. Des Gorman
Head of the University of
Auckland’s School of Medicine, in
an ABC interview last year, who
said: “it is the doctor, and only the
doctor, with his or her training,
expertise, and what he calls
“intellectual muscle, who is most
appropriately skilled and trained,
for example, to decide which of six
or seven kiddies who come through
the door with seemingly similar
presenting symptoms, require a
lumbar puncture for suspected
meningitis, or whether a patient
with breathing difficulties is likely to
have pneumonia, cardiac disease,
asthma.”
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