British doctors are concerned over rights of nurses to prescribe drugs

Concern over rights of nurses to prescribe drugs - Guardian

Extract:

"Medical practitioners today expressed 'serious concerns' over the rights of nurses to prescribe complex medicines after new figures showed a big increase in the practice.

The number of prescriptions issued by independent nurse prescribers has risen by 49% since new rules allowing nurses to prescribe complex medicines to patients were introduced last year, according a report in Pulse, the newspaper for GPs.

The figures have prompted a row among medical practitioners over whether nurses and pharmacists should have the right to prescribe a wide range of drugs in a bid to speed up patient treatment.

Professor Hugh McGavock, visiting professor of prescribing science at the University of Ulster and a former member of the Committee on Safety of Medicines, told Pulse he had "serious concerns" about the rule change.

He said: "Nurses' knowledge of diagnosis is pathetically poor. It takes medical students five years to be competent to make a differential diagnosis. Only a country with not enough doctors would go down this cheapy line.""

Hollow laughter here...)o: - Could there be any health professionals worse at diagnosis and at prescribing than NHS doctors? - Not in my experience! - Their reckless and inappropriate prescribing of powerful drugs when they have wholly inadequate knowledge of the adverse side-effects of the drugs beggars belief! If that were not the case, I would not be a steroid victim, and nor would the scores of other steroid victims in this country.

Remember, friends, whenever, in any country, doctors go on strike, the death rate goes down...(o: (Check it out on the internet.) - There's a lesson for us all.

Plus we have a pathetic system of regulating drugs. - http://www.mhra.gov.uk/ - This is the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency - surely a euphemistic title if ever there was one!

It is an executive agency of the Department of Health and the MHRA website makes the grandiose claim that: "We enhance and safeguard the health of the public by ensuring that medicines and medical devices work, and are acceptably safe." - Well they make a lamentable job of this!

There are no warnings for patients that they should eat no salt or food containing salt when taking certain drugs, most importantly many quite commonly prescribed steroids, HRT, other drugs containing oestrogen, amitriptyline and many other anti-depressants and anti-psychotics, and some other drugs, because these drugs can and often do cause sodium and water retention and therefore, potentially, morbid obesity and a host of other serious health problems.

If the MHRA were doing its job properly they would have long ago curbed the recklessly excessive over-prescribing of these drugs, many of which have been being prescribed for over 50 years, and implemented a mandatory monitoring of patients taking these drugs, in order to prevent morbid obesity, etc developing. - As it is, because of their failure to do their job properly, there are many thousands of obese and morbidly obese people in this country as a direct result of taking drugs prescribed by NHS doctors.

I'd trust a pharmacist ahead of a doctor for knowing about drugs, and I'd trust a prescribing nurse ahead of a doctor for taking the trouble to look up a drug to check the side-effects.

Doctors have got a good PR machine, but it's not matched by their performance...)o: