Authors

  1. Dugan, Mary Ann DNP, CRNP, FNP-BC

Article Content

Providing a telephone or electronic prescription to a pharmacy is a vital skill for nurse practitioner (NP) providers during the workday. However, many NP programs do not teach this essential skill as part of their didactic or clinical course content. One way to integrate this needed skill into the curriculum is to include a simulation of the process as an activity in the didactic or clinical portion of the course. It can be done several ways. The first includes emailing students a scenario that requires a prescription as treatment and having the students "call in" an appropriate prescription to the faculty member's office phone as the pharmacy with a place to leave the script instructions. Another option to provide learners an opportunity to hone this skill is to incorporate the experience of providing a telephone prescription as part of an on-campus simulation that is already included in the course. Creating these types of opportunities incurs no cost to the students or school of nursing. When used by the author, students reported that this was a helpful experience they can use later in practice. In addition, preceptors expressed excitement that the program was offering this as part of students' clinical preparation. A prescription call template with a rubric is included as an example in Supplemental Digital Content, Template, http://links.lww.com/NE/A775.