What is "Prescribing Ready"?

The term "prescriber ready" was included in the Nursing and Midwifery Council's 2018 standards for pre-registration nurses. In line with updated standards that embed more competencies aligned to prescribing, they stated:

Under the new Future Nurse proficiencies, newly qualified nurses will have a higher level of proficiency in skills such as assessment, diagnostics, care planning and management, pharmacology and leadership.

This resource uses the general term 'prescribing ready' to indicate a stage prescribers have reached or need to reach to be able to prescribe legally, safely, and effectively from the appropriate formulary. It is applicable both to learners who are not yet prescribers, as well as those who are qualified to prescribe, but applying the principles to new products or areas of practice. It refers to being 'prescribing ready' in relation to scope of practice.

How can I prepare for the prescribing programme?

Prescribing programmes can be time-demanding as a lot of information needs to be absorbed and knowledge expressed. There are some resources available to test readiness for prescribing, and it is also useful to become familiar with the standards and competencies associated with prescribing.

A 'preparing to prescribe' toolkit has been made available to help self assess your readiness for undertaking a prescribing course: https://www.surreytoolkit.uk/toolkit-main/


What is reflective practice?

Experiences can be the basis of much of your learning. Consider the following:

  • What do you normally do with your experiences professionally or academically?

  • In the course of your working day, how often do you find something you don’t know enough about, so explore the topic?

  • How often do you question your own understanding and knowledge base?

To assist with the process of gaining learning from experience, reflective models have been developed.

Using a reflective model

It is useful to explore different models so you can select and apply a model to ensure a good degree of analysis is undertaken. One of the earliest, based on Kolb’s work, was Gibbs’ (1988) Reflective Model. Kolbs Experiential Learning Cycle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp-gaV-uSIo