Scope of Practice

Every legislative session, allied health professionals ask lawmakers to broaden their scope of practice to some form of health care only physicians are trained and authorized to provide. Today's TMA Legislative News Hotline video reports that lawmakers passed no such Texas Medical Association-opposed bills this term.

More than halfway into the 86th Texas Legislature, scope of practice and maternal health have medicine playing defense and offense, respectively. Check out Texas Medicine’s Bill Watch on these issues, while brushing up on TMA’s overall Healthy Vision priorities for the 2019 legislative session.

The sentence has appeared in every edition of the Texas Medical Association’s Healthy Vision series since the first Healthy Vision 2010 was published 14 years ago: “TMA opposes any efforts to expand any health professionals’ scope of practice beyond what is safely permitted by their education, training, and skills.” That focus on safety remains an integral part of Healthy Vision 2025, published last week. And that sentence remains, verbatim.

Texas’ new opioid prescribing rules, board certification, and lawsuits top the list of popular topics that Texas Medicine Today covered this year. Want to know what else intrigued Texas physicians in 2018?

“Remember the old saying: If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

That was the warning C.M. Schade, MD, past president of the Texas Pain Society, delivered as he finished listing the society’s priorities for the 2019 Texas Legislature during the Texas Medical Association’s annual Advocacy Retreat on Saturday morning at the Renaissance Austin.

Texas is facing a chronic physician shortage, especially in rural areas and urban cities. Some argue that giving advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) more leeway to prescribe and treat patients will help address that shortage. But is that a workable solution?

The Texas Society of Anesthesiologists is questioning a Corpus Christi hospital’s decision to replace its long-time anesthesiology team with a group it says appears ready to give certified registered nurse anesthetists more autonomy than Texas law allows.

TMA has a number of tools to help physicians manage nonphysician practitioners (NPPs) properly.

Physician assistants one day might go by a different name under a resolution the American Academy of PAs (AAPA) passed during its annual conference in May.

The TMA, AMA, and other state medical societies are asking the National Council of State Boards of Nursing to remove or revise parts of an interstate compact that would alter state scope-of-practice laws for advanced practice registered nurses.

TMA strongly opposes proposed new state rules that would continue to allow chiropractors to practice acupuncture and to perform other procedures and services outside the scope of practice for chiropractic.