Nurse Practice Act

Abstract: The Nurse Practice Act has been put into place to protect those who are nurses and to govern the choices that are made. It is a set of rules that gives nurses a parameter for what they are allowed to do and are not to do in their practice. Of course, most of the time rules are made after a situation or problem happens that requires those specific rules to be made and this is how the history of the nurse practice acts evolved. The Nurse Practice Act influences every nurse’s daily practice in the field as a set of guidelines to follow for practice such as delegation guidelines, for example.

Illinois Nurse Practice Act

Purpose

The state Nurse Practice Act has been written as guidelines for the way to provide safe

At this time, before the Industrial Revolution, anyone could call themselves a nurse and act as a nurse. However, with the advance of technology, services started to become more specialized and regulated. The responsibility of regulating nurse practice fell to the state level because there are no guidelines at the federal level for nursing. Laws have to be made for nursing to keep individuals safe under the care of others, including nurses. In addition to this, nurses wanted the profession to be “legitimized” to the public. The Nurse Practice Act also allowed the limitation of the number of people who were hired as nurses, improved the standards of education for nursing schools, and raised the quality of nurses.

The first nurse registration law was placed in 1903 in North Carolina. In 1938, New York defined a scope of practice for nurses. By the 1970’s, all states required nurses to be licensed as RN’s and LPN’s. Now all states have a nurse practice act which has been passed by state legislature. The state board of nursing has assisted state legislators with developing rules and regulations to make the law more specific and clear for nurses. These rules and regulations are sent for public review before they are set in stone and enacted. However, once these are enacted, they have the same effects of

The scope of practice is an RN’s job description including nursing assessment of health status, development of plan of nursing care, administration of medication, delegation of interventions to implement the plan of care, maintenance of safe and effective nursing care, being a patient advocate, evaluating responses to interventions and the effectiveness, etc. A lot of these pieces of the RN scope of practice are the steps of the nursing process. As a nurse, it must be remembered that if you do anything outside of the scope of practice and your job description, it will haunt you and there will be