NPS want to prescribe controlled drugs

SASKATOON — Saskatchewan nurse practitioners are urging provincial regulators to move quickly on changes that would allow them to prescribe controlled drugs such as strong painkillers and anti-anxiety medication.

“We know that it’s the patients we serve who are suffering,” said Maureen Klenk, past president of the Saskatchewan Association of Nurse Practitioners.

“We’re trying to advocate speed on this to eliminate as much suffering as we can.”

Often working in northern or isolated communities without a full-time doctor, nurse practitioners can prescribe most medications. After 11 years of lobbying by nurses, the federal government made regulatory changes in November that will allow NPs to prescribed controlled drugs, which have tighter rules because they are potentially subject to abuse and illegal trafficking.

But the NPs now face a provincial hurdle: several regulatory agencies must agree how on they will track and monitor NPs’ prescribing habits. To do it requires a new nursing bylaw and, possibly, the tweaking of the provincial health privacy law.

Federal legislation requires that the provinces track who is prescribing these controlled drugs, how often, and to whom, says Lynn Digney-Davis, Saskatchewan’s chief nursing officer.

Digney-Davis, herself an NP in Raymore, says the plan is to use the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan’s Prescription Review Program, which already traces doctors’ prescribing of controlled drugs. The SRNA hopes the changes will be enacted before the end of 2013.