Updated PA Practice Act Removes Barriers for Nebraska PAs

Removes References to Physician Direction and Control of PAs

August 19, 2020

On August 15, Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts signed L.B. 755, which streamlined statutory language relating to PA practice and made several changes allowing PAs to provide improved care to patients. Among other provisions, L.B. 755:

• Improves the flexibility of PAs to provide care in group practices by allowing a PA’s scope to be determined by the PA’s education, training, and experience as long as a physician in the group has a similar scope;
• Removes extraneous references to physician direction and control of PAs;
• Removes language stating that a PA is the agent of the PA’s supervising physician;
• Removes practice restrictions for PAs who practice in hospital settings and PAs who have less than two years of experience;
• Clarifies that PAs may practice in remote settings and removes restrictions on PAs practicing in remote settings with less than two years of experience;

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• Removes provisions outlining the information required in a PA-physician agreement, allowing these decisions to be made by the PA-physician team;
• Removes the requirement that a physician’s name be on the label of a prescription issued by a PA;
• Specifically authorizes PAs to dispense, request, receive, or sign for drug samples;
• Authorizes PAs to order/prescribe durable medical equipment, nutrition, blood and blood products, home health, hospice, physical therapy, and occupational therapy;
• Allows PAs to pronounce death and sign death certificates and other forms within the PA’s scope of practice without physician co-signature;
• Changes the voting status of the Board of Medicine member of the PA Committee to “nonvoting”; and
• Requires one of the physician members of the Board of Medicine to have experience practicing with PAs.

L.B. 755, which will be effective on November 14, 2020, is the product of several years of work by the Nebraska Academy of PAs (NAPA) and involved significant collaboration with the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services and the Nebraska Medical Association. AAPA assisted NAPA with legislative drafting and research.

For more information about L.B. 755 or PA practice in Nebraska, contact Erika Miller, Director, State Advocacy & Outreach.

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