A place for all prescribers in healthcare

Welcome to this October issue of the Journal of Prescribing Practice.

It's the start of yet another academic year and there is no shortage of students of all kinds: the eager-faced pre-registration nurses for all fields of practice, undergraduate allied health professionals and many, many non-medical prescribing students. Despite the thousands I have trained in my career as an educator, there seems to be no let-up in the demand for prescribing training. Something that was seen as ‘bizarre’ and ‘novel’ when I first started teaching it in the early 2000s is now a widely accepted qualification for many health professionals at points in their career and is embedded into healthcare practice in many clinical areas. I can look back to the beginning and wonder if we ever realised then just how far we would come.

In those early days it was seen as something for elite and experienced professionals (nurses only in the very beginning) – but now, with good robust legislation and professional regulation there is a place for prescribers in all areas of healthcare. The main safety feature here is that they should all only be prescribing within their scope of practice, and not beyond their limits of competence.