How to Choose Your Scope of Practice for Your Independent Prescribing Course

Hey everybody, it’s Faheem, pharmacist prescriber, contractor, and founder of MEDLRN. It’s amazing for you to be here today and I hope you are all in good health because we have an absolutely special article today. We are going to be focusing on making sure that you thoroughly understand everything you need to know about your scope of practice.

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Whether you’re a nurse, a pharmacist or a healthcare professional that can legally get onto a prescribing course, you are going to be at some point coming across the scope of practice. These are the questions that we get asked all the time. Whether it’s Farooq dealing with our students, whether it’s myself or my colleagues, we get asked: What is the scope of practice? How do I choose a scope of practice? Can you provide us with examples? How do we write a scope of practice?

You can visit our website www.medlrn.com because there is so much information there that can assist with answering your questions about how do you get onto a prescribing course, how to find a DMP or a DPP. We got it all covered for you folks.

What is a Scope of Practice?

First of all, what is the scope of practice? And I’m going to use this term SOP. You can think of a scope of practice as an area in which you are competent to advise, manage and treat. So let’s break it down. This is an area, so this is a disease state, it could be a disease state. This is a disease state that you can safely manage. So you can manage, you can diagnose and you can treat.

When you’re thinking about a scope of practice, what you’re thinking is that can I safely manage, diagnose and treat that disease? How do I know if I can? Number one, let me have a look at the RPS framework for prescribers because that is something that I need to make sure that I can demonstrate that I can do for my portfolio when I’m on the course.

Also ask yourself, do I know how common that condition is? Do I know how age affects that condition? Do I know how sex affects the condition? What about geography? Is this condition more common in certain areas? What about etiology? What’s the cause? What about pathology? Is it microscopic? Is it macroscopic? Do you know the signs and symptoms? And then what about the treatment?

How to Choose Your Scope of Practice

How you choose your scope of practice, think of your experience. If you’re a community pharmacist, what do you see a lot of? You see acute conditions. So you see coughs, colds, ears, nose, throats, respiratory conditions, skin conditions. If you’re a nurse or a pharmacist in general practice, then it might be chronic conditions. For example, asthma, diabetes, hypertension. As you can see, different paramedics deal with different areas. That’s how you choose your scope. It’s all individual to you, what you can safely manage, diagnose and treat.

Example Areas for Scope of Practice

Let’s think about example areas. You can choose maybe ENT related conditions. So that might be your otitis media, otitis externa, sinusitis and so on. What about respiratory? Maybe you might want to focus on respiratory. And with respiratory, and in theory, the respiratory system includes ENT, but here you might think about for example asthma, COPD, infections of the lungs, bacterial infections like pneumonia, bronchitis and so on. What about abdomen? So you might want to focus on abdomen. What about skin? What about musculoskeletal?

How to Write Your Scope of Practice

What you want to know is, how do you write the scope of practice? What I’d like you to do is remember some universities will expect your scope of practice to be very narrow and some universities will expect to be very broad. That’s the key thing for you to understand. Narrow or broad.

Broad vs. Narrow Scope of Practice

Let’s think of a broad scope of practice. I may write down on my statement that “I will diagnose, manage and treat ENT related conditions, related differentials in children and adults aged between six years plus with no comorbidities and otherwise well.” That’s a broad scope of practice.

For a narrow scope, you might say, “I will diagnose, manage and treat bacterial pharyngitis in children age six plus to 18 years with no comorbidities.” So you’re becoming very specific.

Every university is different. For example, Leicester University, they require your scope of practice to be more broad. Some universities require your scope of practice to be a bit more narrow, but you need to have a scope of practice that you can demonstrate that you’re competent in.

Conclusion

To recap, what is your scope of practice? What have you learned today? What you’ve learned is number one, my scope of practice is a condition that I can safely manage, diagnose and treat easily. And I have experience in it. I’m seeing patients, I’m doing it. Then how do you choose your scope of practice? If you know what your scope of practice is, you can easily choose your scope of practice. Then you’re focusing on example areas. Am I good at ENT, respiratory, musculoskeletal, which areas am I good in? And then how to write your scope of practice. Simply choose the disease state. So diagnosis and management of. Insert blank the disease or the overall body system like ENT. So diagnosis, management, treatment of ENT or let’s say otitis media in age range. Which age range? Adults, children, age range.

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