Introduction
Community nurses have a central role in assessing dying patients’ needs for pain and symptom control and enabling their timely access to appropriate medications. A synthesis of the small body of international research suggests that nurses often face difficulties because of limited knowledge and experience with relevant medications, lack of resources, and differentials in professional power between themselves and medical practitioners. In the United Kingdom, there has been a widespread introduction of ‘anticipatory prescribing’ especially in community-based palliative care. This involves general practitioners (GPs) writing prescriptions in anticipation of them being needed by a certain patient and the development of systems to ensure that medications can be dispensed ‘out-of-hours’. Anticipatory medications (AMs) give considerable responsibility to community nurses, who must make decisions about their administration, however there is little evidence about nursing practice in this area. This article reports data from an ethnographic study involving 61 nurses working in two regions of England in community-based care, including nursing homes, with a view to addressing this gap.