Nurse Formularies

The Nurse Formulary and Extended Nurse Formulary ceased to exist after April 2006. All formulary nurses became Nurse Independent Prescribers, and able to prescribe from the full drug dictionary.

The information required to support Nurse Formularies is contained within the data distributed in the drug dictionary by Gemscript. There is no facility to create your own practice nurse formulary.

Each drug is identified at the pack level as belonging to:

• either the Nurse Prescribers' Formulary (see Drug Tariff Part XVIIB (i))
• or the Nurse Prescribers' Extended Formulary (see Drug Tariff Part XVIIB (ii)).

The NPEF contains all the drugs included within the NPF, explicitly avoiding the complication of selection from two formularies.

Formulary information is held at pack level. Therefore there may be cases when one pack for a given drug is nurse prescribable but others are not. For instance, it may be valid for a nurse to prescribe a pack of six plasters but not one of six dozen. Ultimately it is the responsibility of the Nurse to ensure that a valid pack is selected.