Assessing students' confidence in prescribing: contributing facilitators and constraints.

Abstract

There is a growing number of non-medical prescribers in the UK. Practitioners working in advanced and specialist roles access university-based non-medical prescribing programmes to enhance their clinical practice. Despite this clinical and cultural shift, there is a paucity of literature and evidence on this issue. Using a mixed-methods approach of a focus group and the Likert survey, this study explored the experiences of specialist practice district nursing students undertaking non-medical prescribing. The findings of the study suggested that while the students felt supported by their teams, university and peers, there were limitations to the supervisors available and supervised prescribing opportunities, with a variance in the experiences of prescribing supervision. Further exploration into the experiences of prescribing supervision is warranted, as is the experience of prescribing students across multiple care settings.