Implications for practice and research

• ■ The study suggests that nurse prescribers' consultations have a positive impact on patients with diabetes and highlights characteristics which nurses might include in their consultations.

• ■ A number of factors were identified as necessary prerequisites to good practice, including: continuity, flexibility over consultation length, interpersonal skills and specialist diabetes knowledge. As the authors rightly point out “now identified, it is important that these characteristics are promoted and protected.”

• ■ Nurses must ensure that they include an opportunity to discuss medicines' side effects in consultations with patients.

• ■ We need further studies which move beyond self-report data to rigorously and directly analyse the relationship between nurse prescribing and patient outcomes.

Context

The background to the study is that, in the UK, there has been an incremental extension of prescribing rights to appropriately qualified nurses and other …