How State Board Nursing Practice Standards and/or Organizational or Governmental Policies affect the Population Problem Defined

Each state has its own set of nursing standards that resident nurses must follow. The standards frequently dictate independent practice and prescriptive authority. In Alabama, for example, a certified registered nurse (RN) is responsible for providing continuous and comprehensive care for a wide range of conditions for which the certified RN is educationally prepared, taking patients’ health histories and performing physical examinations, formulating working diagnoses, prescribing (albeit with limited prescriptive authority), administering and providing therapeutic measures, tests, and drugs, counseling patients, consulting and referring to other professionals (Alabama Board of Nursing, 2022).

The scope of practice established by the State Board of Nursing allows nurses to be fully responsible for the patients they care for, in this case, adult hypertensive patients. Specific organizational rules also govern how nurses care for patients. For example, certain organizations, such as the one with which I work, limit nurses’ prescriptive authority and only allow them to do so under the supervision of a physician. This can have negative consequences because one must wait for a physician to prescribe medications, which can cause the patient’s treatment to be delayed.