Nurses' confidence and pharmacological knowledge: a study.

The introduction of nurse prescribing will assist the government to deliver its agenda of providing patients with faster access to advice and health services. This study evaluated the knowledge base, self-rated knowledge and confidence, for a prescribing role, in a group of community nurses in Essex. A questionnaire was distributed to 183 community nurses recruited using a random, stratified method, and 110 nurses returned completed forms. Nurse prescribers in the sample were more confident and rated their knowledge more highly when compared with non-prescribing nurses. However, prescribers' actual medication-related knowledge, relative to their high levels of confidence, was not confirmed with performance on case scenarios. In responses to the case scenarios, prescribers did not perform as well as non-prescribers on all five analysed scenarios. The overall assessment of the nurses' response to the OTC case scenarios showed a poor performance when compared with prescription cases. There is a need to improve community nurses' levels of confidence and their abilities in coping with medication-related issues at pre-registration and post-registration level.