In: Nursing
how can you explain New York nurse practice act?
All states and territories have enacted a nurse practice act (NPA) by the state’s legislature with laws which protect the public's health and welfare by overseeing and ensuring the safe practice of nursing. As a caring profession nursing requires specialized knowledge, skill, and independent decision making. The scope of nursing practice also varies with the different caring areas and situations. The risk of harm is inherent in the provision of nursing care either by human errors or by mistake. The reasonable laws to regulate nursing practice will help the nurses and the consumers of care from harm.
The NPA will include the following concepts:
BON or Board of nursing: Authority, power and composition
Standards of education program
Scope and practice standards of nursing
Different titles and licenses
Licensure requirements
Grounds for disciplinary action, violations of the act and possible remedies
The NPA guidelines and rules limit the parameters within which the nurses can work in order to ensure safe and professional nursing practice. The NPA is a dynamic document, evolves and updated or amended as needed along with changes in the scope of practice. Nurses must know about the NPA to practice in different situations with confidence.
The New York NPA defines nursing as a registered profession in which the nurses are diagnosing and treating human responses to actual or potential health problems. Nurses will do this by services as case finding, health teaching, health counselling, and provision of care supportive to or restorative of life and well-being, and executing medical regimens prescribed by a legally authorized licensed physician, dentist or other licensed health care provider in accordance with the commissioner's regulations.
The RNs are authorized to function independently when providing various aspects of medical care within the scope of practice. The practices outside the personal scope of competence or outside of what is allowed by New York law by a nurse could be charged with professional misconduct.