State Practice Agreement
They’re a lot of collaboration issues that a nurse practitioner in West Virginia faces. The first issue is that a nurse practitioner cannot fully prescribe a patient without a collaborative agreement with a doctor. The doctor will be responsible for ensuring that the nurse’s patient records and prescriptions are correct. However, some Nurse practitioners argue that sometimes it can be hard to get a doctor to collaborate (Lofton, 2016). This means that it can hinder the practice of NP. The state practice agreement of Virginia is that advanced practice nurses with a three-year experience can start to take care of patients without oversight from the physician or a doctor (Hill et al., 2016). This has raised many issues as some view it as discrimination while the state says it is doing so to safeguard the patients and help the nurses get the experience that would help them in their advanced stages.
The other challenge is that nurse practitioners are not allowed to prescribe schedule II narcotics. According to the states board, NPs do not have specialized training on prescribing such as narcotics (Lofton, 2016). They claim that West Virginia has the highest number of overdose cases, which is why they choose collaboration to reduce the instances and make it easy to follow up if a case of overdose is reported.
According to the above issues, I think the barriers for NP practicing independently is due to lack of proper exposure or training and also lack of enough experience (Dillon & Gary, 2017). I would plan that medical schools adjust their curriculum to equip nurses with the necessary knowledge to be independent nurse practitioners. This could include the prescribing of drugs and also narcotics.
References
Dillon, D., & Gary, F. (2017). Full practice authority for nurse practitioners. Nursing administration quarterly, 41(1), 86-93.
Hill, J. D., Hill, J. M., & Gentile, N. J. (2016). A review of state pharmacist collaborative practice laws. American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, 73(18), 1467-1472.
Lofton, K. L. (2016, June 6). Bill allows specialized nurses to practice independently. West Virginia Public Broadcasting. https://www.wvpublic.org/post/bill-allows-specialized-nurses-practice-independently#stream/0