Teaching Idea: Scope of Practice Review

Written by

ChartFlow

Date published

Sep 22, 2025

How do students remember what’s in their scope of practice and what’s not? Practice, of course!

This lesson can be adapted to nursing, CNA, and medical or advanced practice students.

Open your school’s academic EHR to the Orders section. If you don’t have an academic EHR, you can always contact us for a demo of ChartFlow at hello@chartflow.io, or use a free spreadsheet app to set up a patient chart. If you’re using a spreadsheet, enter a patient’s name at the top with several orders below.
You should have a patient created with several orders before doing this activity. For example: Vital signs, bathing, imaging, and medications.
During your lecture, open the orders section on a screen or smartboard. Go one by one and ask whose scope of practice each task would fall into. For example, who can start Oxygen? (EMTs, paramedics, nurses, and all higher level providers) Whose scope of practice will the X-Ray fall into? (A CNA or tech will need to transport the patient, the X-Ray technician will do the X-Ray, a physician will interpret it). Do this for each order.

If you teach nursing students, ask them to pick out the orders they would be responsible for. For an added layer of difficulty ask them to prioritize the tasks — which will they do first, second, and third? Ask them to pick out the orders they would delegate to a CNA.
If you teach medical students or advanced practice students, ask them who they would delegate each order to and if any would be within their own daily tasks. Ask them to practice entering an order of their own and tell you what level of provider would be responsible for that order.

Tips: If you’re looking for more information on what each level can provide, check your state laws and regulations. We also have a graphic for general medication administration laws within the United States that you can reference below. This does not include non-medication related tasks.: