Professor Catherine Comiskey:

There are two pieces to that. I did a study in north Dublin and looked at the health and well-being of 131 people in opioid substitute treatment. I left an open question at the end: is there anything else they wanted? I did not ask about nurse prescribing and a load of people came back to me and said we want our nurse to prescribe. They do not see the doctor.

I did not look for that; it came to me. We were really surprised about that because we looked at their health, well-being and mental health and asked them if there was anything else they wanted to add. Out of the 131 people, many came back and said they wanted to work more with our nurse and they wanted the nurse to prescribe. The nurses understand them and they want to engage with them.

Being academics, we then went and did some research on this aspect. We looked at all the international literature on nurse prescribing for people on methadone. It works. It works in other countries and is cost-efficient. We published that work. I am able to say I would support this because the research has supported it. It actually came to me. I did not go looking for it.