PITstop prescribing guidance is for nurses that do not prescribe (non-prescribers), non-medical prescribers and GPs supporting non-prescribers. The guidance highlights the importance of clearly defining your role in advanced diabetes care and knowing when prescribing colleagues must be involved (non-prescribers), and the importance in defining your scope of prescribing practice with diabetes-related medication (non-medical prescribers). The RCN are not planning to write any guidance on this and plan to provide links to recognised guidance from experts in the field, as it is published. The main PITstop messages are relevant to any primary care clinician, but the focus is for PITstop-trained clinicians to use the PITstop resources, including the insulin and GLP-1 care pathways and the general rules, alongside local and NICE guidelines.
The guidance, in our student folder and available to download from the website, evolved in response to an email last year from Sharon Lee, Primary Care Workforce Facilitator for South Kent Coast clinical commissioning group, which highlighted the issue.
I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the course and found it stimulating and rewarding. .. the one thing that I really think should be touched on is the issue of Non Medical prescribing. The course provides the participants with the confidence and the skill to initiate Insulin which is great if you are a prescriber as you are making the judgement and then prescribing the insulin as a Non Medical Prescriber. If the Nurse is not, I think there needs to be a discussion about the governance around Nurses advising the GPs what to prescribe to ensure they remain within their Code Of Conduct.
The PITstop guidance was produced by Anne with the assistance of Rebecca Owen and input from Debbie Hicks, Chair of Trend-UK.