The willingness of nurses to ordain and prescribe drugs

Introduction. Adopted on July 22, 2014, The Law Amending Act on professions of nurse and midwife, introduces the possibility of prescribing by nurses and midwives in Poland.
Objective. Assessment of the preparation of nurses for prescribing, in the opinions of Primary Health Care (PHC) nurses.
Material and methods. The study was conducted from January to July 2015 among 539 Primary Health Care nurses in the city of Rzeszow and its district. The original questionnaire was developed based on five steps Likert scale. The data were compiled using the test Manna-Whitneya and test Kruskala-Wallisa.
Results. More than half of the respondents (52.0%) say they do not have enough knowledge to meet the new competence requirements. Being prepared to prescribe is declared in most cases, by nurses with work experience of 6–10 years (p = 0.0029); from medium-sized cities (p = 0.0064) and with higher education (p = 0.0388). The majority of nurses (76.5%) believe that they should not prescribe any drugs, only medical devices (72.9%), medicines previously ordered by a physician (66.0%) and foods for particular nutritional uses (50.1%). There is a large discrepancy regarding proper physical examination: a large majority (43.9%) believe that nurses are able to physically examine the patient, while 34.7% of respondents give a different answer to this question.
Conclusions. The awareness of nurses about their new competences should be increased as well as their eagerness to get an education that guarantees the possibility of dispensing medication and prescriptions. They should be also more aware of great importance of well conducted physical examination.