Overview
Dietitians have been supplementary prescribers since 2016 and have shown that they can be trusted with the responsibility of prescribing. By not providing independent prescribing rights for UK dietitians, we are adding unnecessary layers of bureaucracy onto an already overstretched NHS, and slowing down the care and service transformation that patients need.
What are the different kinds of prescribing rights?
Independent prescribing is prescribing by a practitioner who is responsible and accountable for the assessment of service users and for making decisions about the medication and treatment they may require.
Supplementary prescribing is a voluntary prescribing partnership between the independent prescriber (doctor or dentist) and a supplementary prescriber, to implement an agreed patient-specific clinical management plan (CMP). For example, a paediatric allergy specialist dietitian may prescribe an adrenaline auto-injector, such as an EpiPen, for children with food allergies - as well as providing dietary advice around food allergen avoidance and food labels reading.
Why are we campaigning for independent prescribing rights?
Since 2016 dietitians have been able to become supplementary prescribers. But the BDA argues that full, independent prescribing rights are needed to enable dietitians to practise at the top end of their license and deliver the best possible care for patients.
This would help provide services with better support and more timely care for patients, improved patient safety, reduced pressure on other professionals and increased system efficiency.
A recent evaluation by the University of Surrey found a wide range of benefits to dietetic supplementary prescribing, including a positive effect on patient experience, choice and access to healthcare, a wider choice of treatment options available to patients and cost savings to the NHS.
It also made the following recommendation: “We recommend urgent review for progressing the dietitian profession to independent prescribing, to facilitate greater optimisation of prescribing skills for advanced practice dietitians."
Watch this video from Alison Culkin, chair of the Prescribers’ Specialist Sub-Group and the first dietitian to become a supplementary prescriber in the UK.
How will the change come about?
In order to make this happen we will need to change legislation in all four nations of the UK.
The current legislation that governs non-medical prescribing outlines the prescribing responsibilities available for each individual profession. This made sense when non-medical prescribing began over 30 years ago, and time was needed to ensure that it could happen safely and effectively.
Nowadays a wide range of professions are able to become supplementary or independent prescribers and we believe that it is time for UK law to reflect our modern medical system.
We want to see a change in the legislation so that prescribing rights are no longer allocated to individual professions, but rather is based on the qualification level of the healthcare practitioner. In essence, this means if a registered medical profession is able to attend an approved education institution to study a prescribing programme, they should be able to become an independent prescriber upon qualification.
What have we been doing?
The BDA has championed prescribing rights for dietitians for over a decade. We led the work to introduce supplementary prescribing in 2016, and we have continued to champion the need for independent prescribing rights for a number of years.
Here’s a summary of the work that we’ve recently undertaken as part of the campaign.
- In 2023 we joined the Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists, British & Irish Orthoptic Society, the Royal College of Occupational Therapists, and the Society of Radiographers to launch our #PrescribingNow campaign. This is a joint campaign across a number of AHPs to push the UK Government to make the necessary policy changes to give independent prescribing rights to dietitians and other AHPs across the four nations.
- In September 2024 we started the BDA campaign working group, made up of eight prescribing dietitians, which is there to support the work and strategy development of the campaign.
- In September 2024 we also joined the Independent Prescribing Rights Proposal Group, which is a group dedicated to creating a proposal to allow all non-medical prescribers to being able to Independently Prescribe all licensed and unlicensed medications within their scope of practice.
- In October 2024 the #PrescribingNow campaign wrote to Health Secretary Wes Streeting calling for the new government to extend independent prescribing responsibilities, and asked for a meeting to discuss the benefits that this would have for the NHS.
We were in Westminster today with other AHP bodies, as part of the #PrescribingNow coalition, to deliver a letter to the @DHSCgovuk calling for independent prescribing rights for occupational therapists and other allied health professionals. (1/4) #AHPsDay pic.twitter.com/Wwx7yYeO4V
— Royal College of Occupational Therapists (@theRCOT) October 14, 2024 - We spoke at the University of Surrey ‘Evaluation of supplementary prescribing by dietitians and independent prescribing by radiographers’ report launch. You can watch the recording of the event on the research project webpage.
- We have continued to raise the issue of independent prescribing with civil servants, politicians and government ministers across the UK during our regular stakeholder engagement.
How can you get involved?
As a dietitian and member of the BDA there is a lot you can do to support our campaign and help make our voice heard by the Government.
- You can support the #PrescribingNow campaign by emailing your MP or using the template letter to write to your MP. Our colleagues at The Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists have provided these templates to support you.
- You can also get involved on social media by using the campaign hashtag #PrescribingNow and showing your support for independent prescribing rights for dietitians. Liking and retweeting our, and our fellow AHPs, social media posts on this campaign goes a long way to show the Department for Health and Social Care that this is a campaign that our members and the profession care about.
- If right for you, also continue to undertake the training and qualifications to become a supplementary prescriber. This helps to show the UK Government that dietitians want prescribing rights and that as a profession we need independent prescribing rights.
- If you are a prescribing dietitian you can join the Prescribers’ Specialist Sub-Group and support the work they do around influencing government policy on independent prescribing.
- Make sure that you read your BDA membership emails so you can get involved with future campaign actions, such as submitting case studies of scenarios where you feel independent prescribing rights would have made a real difference.
- Finally follow us on social media and watch this space as we continue to passionately make the case for independent prescribing rights for our members and more opportunities for you to get involved arise.