Effectiveness and Safety of the Nursing Prescription in Acute Health Problems of Low Complexity

Objective: To compare the efficacy/effectiveness of pharmacological nurse prescription with medical prescription in patients attended in a primary care center for minor acute health problems.

Scope of the study: Multicenter study, with the participation of 8 primary care centers of Catalonia.

Methodology: Randomized blind clinical trial, with experimental group receiving pharmacological nurse prescription and a control group receiving medical prescription. Subjects are individuals who request a same day consultation for minor acute pathologies and meet the selection criteria, with random assignment of 374 subjects, 187 per group.

The efficacy/effectiveness of the prescribed treatment will be considered as a no re-attendance during the following 72h and will be completed with the variables: information and knowledge of the treatment, adverse effects, compliance, satisfaction level and resolution of the health problem. The data collection is done 10 days after the visit by an ad-hoc telephone questionnaire of 11 items, previously tested. The analysis is done using the SPSS software version 21.0, obtaining data of descriptive, multivariate and inferential statistics.

Implications for practice: To evidence the equivalence of pharmacological nurse prescription with medical prescription for minor acute health problems