NURS 6521 Ethical and Legal Implications of Prescribing Drugs

When a patient enters the health center, medication is very likely to be administered. A health history and a patient’s medical evaluation are important things to examine when administering medication. A nurse or doctor should administer the care of the condition and be informed of the standard a condition should be offered depending on a background of health and physical inspection (Rosenthal & Burchum, 2020). In this discussion, the essay focuses on Scenario 2 to clarify the ethical and legal ramifications of patient family, prescriber, pharmacist and patient to all parties concerned. The discussion continues by explaining the methods I will use to drive decision-making for an experienced clinical nurse in the selected scenario.

Selected scenario

A colleague calls and demands for drugs to be taken for her. You are self-sufficient, but do not have the medical experience of your mate. Anyway, you write the drug. The ethical, as well as legal implications of the scenario on all stakeholders such as the prescriber, pharmacist, patient, and patient’s family, discuss as follow:

Nurse Practitioner: A nurse who uses medications without performing the requisite testing, evaluation and legal consequences such as absence, as needed by the medical code of ethics, such as the Colorado “Medical Practice Act,” breaches the code and is unprofessional (Sabatino & Pruchnicki, 2017). The NP who prescribes medication for a friend without a medical background fears jeopardizing his permit since adverse reactions can turn fatal. A nurse has the ethical obligation to prescribe the best medication, but only after a medical exam and evaluation.

Pharmacist: In mediation, a pharmacy dealer who carries out a prescription does not presume that the prescriber has made an examination, nor that the practitioner is ethically and legitimately liable for the background before the order is submitted. Thus, loading the Rx with the pharmacist’s chance of losing the license while knowing his clinical background.

Patient and family: Prescribing drugs to a patient is morally and technically permissible whether a patient may not have an awareness of his or her background, evaluation and allergies. Therefore the patient and the relatives will bring court charges against the nurse and pharmacy firm should any incident take place.

Strategies to Guide Decision making

The first strategy is to call the patient before prescribing medication and to make an appropriate date for a medical evaluation to reach the condition. Medical testing and an assessment may lead to the patient’s medical condition and, therefore, to the required medication (Musellim & Borekci, 2017). In medical and personal interactions, faulty and incorrect prescribe inaccurate medications, less frequent usage for preventive treatment, loss of medical satisfactions, and escalated aggressive incidents against healthcare providers, maybe the result of a patient’s evaluation over a short duration of time. The patient assessment period could have been influenced too gradually or too rapidly.

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The second strategy is to do the clinical examination before administering medication to assess the condition of the patient. Clinical trials are study experiments in which patients actively undergo experimental therapeutic techniques, techniques or measures in order to avoid, diagnose, cure or control various conditions or diseases (Rosenthal & Burchum, 2020). Some studies consider how people react to a new procedure and what side effects may be created. The third method is to implement a prescriptive decision-making process by looking at the patient’s family members and their prior fitness. The prescriptive method of educated judgment aid approaches describes a variety of strategies to enable citizens to think differently about a decision.

Process of Writing Prescriptions

There are important things that physicians should consider before writing medications. Relevant elements must also be considered. Again, it is necessary to remember that there are norms in various countries. The criteria specify that the details on medications are provided. Both medications usually tend to use a vocabulary the consumer can understand such that they can learn quickly how to take medicine. Secondly, it is important to write clearly in writing while writing the medication (Solanki & Shah, 2015). Third, it is necessary to determine the duration of usage of the medication and the days the patient is supposed to take. Additional detail used is subject to local drug laws. With the exponential advancement of technology, electronic prescribing will continue to reduce the cost-effectiveness of drug mistakes. Electronic prescribing is an efficient means of eliminating medication errors. The continuous dependency on handwriting writing is one of the factors that have made medication mistakes inevitable (Nickless & Davies, 2016). Handwritten prescriptions might be negligible. Problems like this can be overcome by technology-based prescribing, as this will help to reduce drug mistakes.

References

Musellim, B., & Borekci, S. (2017). What should be the appropriate minimal duration for patient examination and evaluation in pulmonary outpatient clinics? Annals of Thoracic Medicine, 12(3), 177–182. doi:10.4103/atm.ATM_396_16

Nickless, G., & Davies, R. (2016). How to take an accurate and detailed medication history. The Pharmaceutical Journal.

Rosenthal, L., & Burchum, J. (2020). Lehne’s Pharmacotherapeutics for Advanced Practice Nurses and Physician Assistants. Elsevier – Health Sciences Division.

Sabatino, J. A., & Pruchnicki, M. C. (2017). Improving prescribing practices: A pharmacist-led educational intervention for nurse practitioner students. Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, 29(5), 248-254. doi:10.1002/2327-6924.12446

Solanki, N. D., & Shah, C. (2015). Prescription audit in outpatient department of multispecialty hospital in western India: an observational study. International Journal of Clinical Trials, 14-19.

NURS 6521 Ethical and Legal Implications of Prescribing Drugs