One of the key issues in nursing last year was nurse prescribing. It caused an uproar in some areas of the medical profession, especially when the Government announced that it was going to extend the nurse's power. While patients don't seem to have reacted in the same way as the doctors, probably because they don't care who signs, as long as they get their prescription, the medical profession has branded the proposals ‘irresponsible and dangerous’. Nurses have also been accused of being soft touches to the pharmaceutical industry's marketing ploys and will end up being courted and persuaded to use the wrong products (Copperfield, 2005).