Nurse practitioners as safe as doctors when prescribing meds, study finds

Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia allow nurse practitioners to prescribe medication without a doctor’s supervision. According to a new study, NPs do so just as safely as physicians when it comes to older patients.

This finding could help policymakers with decisions regarding health care, the Stanford researchers said in a press release.

For their study, the researchers focused on patients 65 years and older — not only because the data from Medicare afforded them a national perspective on prescribing quality, but also because so many drugs are prescribed for that age group.

“Older adults account for a huge proportion of all prescriptions written,” senior author David Studdert, LLB, ScD, a professor of health policy and of law, said in the press release. “They are also especially vulnerable to adverse drug events from inappropriate prescribing.”

The researchers looked at the prescribing habits of more than 73,000 doctors and nurse practitioners in 29 states where NPs have that authority. The analysis found both groups averaged about 1.7 inappropriate prescriptions per 100 written.

”Although we found that the average rate of inappropriate prescribing among NPs and physicians was similar, we also found that NPs were over-represented among the best performers and the worst performers,” lead author Johnny Huynh said. “Those lower performers warrant attention from the hospitals, clinics and professional regulators that oversee their care.”

The American Medical Association and other professional organizations have come out against allowing nonphysician prescribing, Stanford said. These groups say widening an NPs scope of duties will affect patient care adversely.

Huynh disagreed with that belief.

“States that are holding off conferring prescriptive authority on nurse practitioners because of concerns about quality of care should think again,” he said.