SB1277 Summary

• Amends the Nurse Practice Act to redefine "registered professional nursing practice" as a scientific process founded on professional knowledge, including all nursing specialties and performance of nursing acts based on professional knowledge, judgment, and skills from approved education programs.

• Authorizes registered professional nurses to delegate nursing interventions and tasks to other registered professional nurses and licensed practical nurses based on comprehensive nursing assessment including patient stability, potential for harm, complexity, outcome predictability, and delegatee competency.

• Authorizes registered professional nurses to delegate tasks (work not requiring nursing knowledge or judgment) to unlicensed personnel based on comprehensive nursing assessment.

• Prohibits registered professional nurses from delegating work requiring nursing knowledge, assessment, judgment, inference, decision making (including medication administration), plan of care development, and plan evaluation to unlicensed non-nurse personnel.

• Removes provisions allowing delegation of medication administration in community-based or in-home care settings to unlicensed personnel; maintains prohibition on medication delegation to unlicensed personnel in institutional and long-term care facilities.

• Takes effect August 1, 2023.