Introduction:

In pharmaceutical care (PC), multiple professionals interact with unclear role boundaries and significant variability across contexts and countries.

Objective:

To identify Portuguese physicians’ views on nurses’ roles in interprofessional PC.

Methods:

Qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive study with an intentional selection of eight physicians with experience in PC. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed according to Polit and Beck (2019).

Results:

In interprofessional PC, nurses are involved in the preparation, administration, monitoring, and prescription of medication, as well as patient/caregiver education. There are some reservations about nurses prescribing medication, although some admit this possibility under specific conditions. Physicians highlighted the nurse-patient/caregiver relationship as strength and the training in pharmacotherapy as a weakness.

Conclusion:

The nursing activity in PC fits into five areas of care. Nurses prescribing medication in specific situations can become a reality if nurses’ training in pharmacotherapy accompanies this evolution.

        · abstract in Portuguese | Spanish     · text in English     · English ( pdf )