Nurses will need new but limited powers to prescribe drugs under the elevated role envisaged for them in the Primary Healthcare Plan, the Irish Nurses Organisation said. The public will have to be educated to accept a greater range of services from nurses where previously doctors attended to them, the organisation added.
The INO general secretary, Mr Liam Doran, welcomed the document and its implications for nurses, who will be an integral part of the planned new multi-disciplinary primary care teams.
"It offers the potential to move away from the medical dominated approach to care where you have to see a doctor for everything, into an environment where other health professionals can interact fully with patients.
"It empowers nurses of all kinds - midwives, community mental health nurses, general nurses. These are all professionals who are underutilised under current structures."
Mr Doran warned, however, that the plan had to be properly funded, with adequate resources for new facilities and staff, if the Department of Health was to attract the 2,000 extra nurses it acknowledged were needed to run the service. He said the new approach would have to be clearly explained to the public.
"We have to educate the public that they do not need to see a doctor to be in safe hands. We have to educate them to accept that other professionals are more than adequately trained to meet their needs."
Mr Doran said legislative changes were needed to give nurses limited powers to prescribe medication. "If you come to a primary care unit with a sprained ankle, there is no reason why a nurse should not be able to bandage it and prescribe an anti-inflammatory."
A detailed description of the new role for nurses is to be drawn up in the Strategy for Nursing and Midwifery in the Community to be published by the end of next year.
Ms Mary McCarthy, chief nursing officer at the Department of Health and chair of the strategy's steering committee, said a willingness among nurses of various disciplines to change their approach was needed "to rethink and deliver new ways of working. Our current nursing services are reflective of a different era," she said.
Ms McCarthy said the current lack of structures had led to "turf wars of professional jealousy".
"We do not always work in a spirit of co-operation," she said.