National review of the scope of nursing and midwifery practice framework. Final report

Abstract

Nurses and midwives in Ireland are knowledgeable and highly skilled resource in the Irish health system. Therefore a key challenge for the Irish health services is to ensure that the nursing and midwifery resource is deployed to optimal advantage, to ensure optimal health care delivery and to ensure that the valuable and costly resource is not underutilised or inappropriately utilised. It is partly for this reason that nurses and midwives need to be empowered to act within the full range of their scope of professional practice and to expand their scope of practice as and when patient and service needs dictate.