Nurse Prescribing: An Integrative Review

One of the most important change role in the nursing profession is the development of nurse prescribing. In the implementation of nurse prescribing, it seems necessary to recognize the existing challenges.

In this review, Persian and English articles were researched in the years of 1998-2023 using the keywords include "nursing prescription", "drug prescription", "independent prescribing" and "supplemental prescribing". The research was done in online databases including Science direct,PubMed, Web of Science, Google scholar and Persian databases including Mag Iran and Jahad Daneshgahi. The inclusion criteria were articles that only focus on the drug prescription in nursing and were related to the objectives of the study. Exclusion criteria included articles whose full text was not available or were presented in the form of a poster, speech and letter to the editor. Also, the validity of the selected articles has been qualitatively evaluated by the authors in terms of originality,credibility and the publishing journal.

58 selected studies showed the advantages, disadvantages, obstacles and facilitating factors of nursing prescription from the point of view of nurses and doctors in Iran and other countries. One of the major challenges is the lack of appropriate policies in this field, the lack of necessary infrastructure, the critical view of the health care team, the lack of issuing legal licenses, and the unwillingness of some nursing.

 Considering the benefits and advantages of nurse prescribing, it is suggested that policy makers and nursing managers provide the conditions for the implementation of nurse prescribing in Iran with planning for existing challenges, including legal licenses, holding specialized pharmacology courses for nurses and encourage nurses to accept this responsibility.