Health Policy Change in Nursing

Benchmark Assignment
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Benchmark Assignment: Changing Alabama’s Nurse Practitioner Scope of Practice Policy
Nursing is the world’s biggest medical profession with almost four million nurses in America alone. For that reason, nurses can significantly influence politics and policy at the state and national level. Actually, nurses have both the professional and moral duty to be engaged in legislation that has an impact on their patients. Nurses are often frustrated by policies that affect nursing practice, especially the policies that have written by people who have inadequate healthcare experience and knowledge. This frustration usually results in burn-out, disillusionment, negativity, as well as bitterness (Poghosyan, Boyd & Knutson, 2014). Nursing practitioners need to instead channel their frustrations into making a positive difference in their profession, for instance by striving to make policy changes. This paper proposes a health policy change which is currently a law at the state level that I believe needs to change. The selected policy pertains to advanced nursing practice.
One particular public policy that has to be changed is Alabama’s Scope of Practice (SOP) law. The policy change seeks to introduce a change to a current law in the state of Alabama. For advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs), the lack of full practice authority (FPA) is a major impediment to the delivery of comprehensive, high-quality, cost-effective and efficient healthcare services (Xue et al., 2016). Advanced practice registered nurses have the experience, skills, knowledge, and education that is needed for providing comprehensive and basic primary care services. APRNs are a ready workforce, well-positioned to contribute to health disparities reduction efforts, improving access to care, and reducing the cost of delivering such care (Poghosyan, Boyd & Knutson, 2014). Even so, obstacles at both the national level and the state level are preventing them from practicing to the full extent of their training and education. Full practice authority of advanced practice registered nurses is of great importance to attaining health equity (Lugo, 2016).
Wording of the current law
In the year 2013, the Alabama Legislature enacted ACT 2013-223. The exact wording of this law states that this piece of legislation “confers to Certified Nurse Midwives (CNM) and Certified Registered Nurse Practitioners (CRNP) the authority of prescribing controlled substances in Schedules three, four and five.” However, for a CRNP and CNM to receive a controlled substances certificate, the Alabama law requires him/her to be “in a collaborative practice with a qualified medical doctor who has an unrestricted and valid Alabama Controlled Substances Certificate (ACSC)” (Alabama Board of Pharmacy, 2018).
This therefore means that the scope of practice of registered nurse practitioners in Alabama is still restricted. Although they can prescribe medication, their level of independence with which they could prescribe medical services, medical devices, and drugs is highly restricted. They operate under restricted practice conditions. The proposed policy change seeks t...