What is it about?
Non-medical prescribing is becoming more common in children's hospices in the UK. This paper explores the impact of non-medical prescribing on children and their families, prescribers and the wider hospice care team. It also aims to identify the perceived benefits and challenges of prescribing from the perspective of prescribers themselves, and the managers of children's hospice services.
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Why is it important?
The findings show that non-medical prescribers are making a significant contribution to the prescribing workforce within hospices. It highlights a number of challenges and barriers that need to be addressed to enable hospices to realise the benefits.
Perspectives
As a non-medical prescriber and a manager of hospice services, I was aware of some of the challenges faced by individual practitioners and organisations. For practitioners, the challenges surrounded access to training and education that supported clinical decision making and a lack of peer support, owing to the relative small size of individual hospices. The findings demonstrate the contribution that nurses are making to the prescribing needs of children and young people in hospices. This paper suggests ways in which organisations can support nurses to be effective prescribing, improving the practice of staff and therefore the care experience of children with palliative care needs, and their families.
Dr Michael J Tatterton
University of Bradford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Independent non-medical prescribing in children's hospices in the UK: a practice snapshot, International Journal of Palliative Nursing, August 2017, Mark Allen Group,
DOI: 10.12968/ijpn.2017.23.8.386.
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