Letters
Practice nursing
EDITOR, - David Jewell and Pat Turton's editorial on practice nursing highlights the difficulties encountered when a new role for nurses is developed without careful planning.1 A similar situation is arising for clinical nurse specialists in hospital practice, and the changes are rapid owing to the determined efforts of the Department of Health to reduce the hours of junior doctors and increase the educational aspect of their posts. Contracts to increase the volume of work without the provision of additional money and to reduce the length of stay for patients to enable bed closures and savings mean that the systems in hospital have to be well organised.
Preoperative assessment by nurses can be highly efficient; in addition, the nurses' role should be expanded to include other tasks such as insertion of intravenous cannulas, limited prescribing, and writing of discharge summaries. Many duties of house staff could be undertaken by nurses,
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- What's happening to practice nursing?
- D Jewell and P Turton
BMJ 1994 308: 735-736.[Extract] [Full Text]
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