Nursing Practice Act

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NPA

The Nursing Practice Act
Cody Gammons
Nursing roles 1

Nursing Practice Act
The Nursing Practice Act (NPA) is one of the most important state law governing nursing practice.it defines the scope and limitations of professional nursing practice. The NPA was written to protect the public, and to hold the individual nurse responsible for his or her actions. According to Cherry and Jacob (2014), “Once these administrative rules and regulations are formally adopted, they have the same force and effect as any other law.” Although NPAs vary from state to state they usually contain the following information: Definition of the term RN, description of professional nursing functions, standards of competent performance, behaviors that represent misconduct or prohibited practices, grounds for disciplinary action, and fines and penalties the licensing board may levy when a NPA is violated.
Surprisingly, many nurses are not even aware that the NPA is a law. They are not familiar with the administrative rules and regulations enacted by the licensing board. Each nurse should own a copy of the Nursing Practice Act. The NPA and licensing board rules and regulations provide essential information that clarifies these important questions. Protecting the scope of practice for nurses, particularly advanced practice registered nurses, is a major initiative at American Nursing Association (ANA). ANA is working together with our Constituent Member (State) Associations to help remove geographic and practice setting limitations for APRNs. We are still working state by state to ensure that state laws affecting Advanced Practice Registered Nurses are both fair and consistent across the country, and that your scope of practice is not unfairly limited. In addition to this work, we have a number of projects that ANA collaborates on to keep APRNs working to the full potential of their

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