Situational Analysis of Nurse Prescribing Context in Iran: A Qualitative Research

Drug prescribing by nurses is a historic movement for the nursing profession and an essential part of the solution that the leading countries health care system applied in order to improve access and reduce patients waiting time to receive medication. Despite the increasing attention of the world to discuss nurse prescribing, the review of the literature indicates that there is no evidence in nurse prescribing in Iran. This study aimed to assess nurse prescribing context in our country.
Material & This study was designed as a descriptive qualitative study. The purposeful sampling method carried out through semi-structured interviews with various stakeholders of health care system, including policy makers, doctors and nurses. Data analysis was conducted using conventional content analysis and the coding of interviews was performed by MAXQDA software. To achieve the accuracy and reliability of the data, the Lincoln and Guba authenticity criteria were used.
Analysis of the recorded interviews of participants in this study resulted in 38 original codes, 5 sub categories and 5 main categories. The main extracted categories were "The theoretical context of nurse prescribing " with 2 sub categories, "Organizational context of nurse prescribing" with 3 sub categories, "Educational context of nurse prescribing", "Research context " and "The socio-cultural context of nurse prescribing,".
The views and perspectives of nursing policy makers and health care system stakeholders indicated there are many challenges in organizational, educational, research and socio-cultural context of nurse prescribing that require the problem based designing in nurse prescribing field.