Can a nurse practitioner treat without a supervising physician in Arkansas?
Who treats · part of The Practice Perimeter
Short answer
Only with full independent practice authority — unencumbered Arkansas license, active prescriptive authority certificate, and 6,240 practice hours approved by the Board of Nursing; until then a collaborative practice agreement with protocols applies.
Arkansas is a two-tier state, and the hours are the gate. a certified nurse practitioner or clinical nurse specialist reaches full independent practice authority only after being currently licensed in Arkansas with no encumbrance on any nursing license in any jurisdiction, holding an active prescriptive authority certificate, and having “Completed a minimum of six thousand two hundred forty (6,240) hours of practice: (A) Under a board-required agreement with a physician; or (B) In another state, territory, or foreign country that authorizes a certified nurse practitioner or a clinical nurse specialist to practice with prescriptive authority”. The application goes to the Arkansas State Board of Nursing or its Full Independent Practice Credentialing Committee with an affidavit of those hours.
17 CAR § 123-702 (Full practice authority — certified nurse practitioner or clinical nurse specialist) · verified Sep 8, 2026 · regulatory monitoring, not legal advice
Related Arkansas rules
Until then the agreement is not optional and neither is the paperwork under it. “Protocols are required for all APRNs practicing under a collaborative practice agreement.” They must be available to the Arkansas State Board of Nursing on request, and must at a minimum state the “Indications for and classifications of legend drugs, controlled substances … and therapeutic devices that will be prescribed or administered by the APRN” together with the “Date the protocol was adopted or last reviewed, which shall be at least annually.”
17 CAR § 123-603 (Protocols for prescriptive authority) · verified Sep 8, 2026
A supervising physician and/or back-up supervising physician or physicians should be available for immediate telephone contact with the physician assistant any time the physician assistant is rendering services to the public.
17 CAR § 140-1806 (Availability of supervising physician) · verified Sep 4, 2026
How other states answer this
- Alabama
- Alaska
- Arizona
- California
- Colorado
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- District of Columbia
- Florida
- Georgia
- Hawaii
- Idaho
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Kansas
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Maine
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Michigan
- Minnesota
- Mississippi
- Missouri
- Montana
- Nebraska
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- New York
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Ohio
- Oklahoma
- Oregon
- Pennsylvania
- Rhode Island
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- Vermont
- Virginia
- Washington
- West Virginia
- Wyoming
Related Arkansas questions
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- Can a physician assistant inject or prescribe in Arkansas?
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← All Arkansas rules and changes · MedSpaRadar is regulatory monitoring and reference: it summarizes public laws, regulations and agency actions and links each to its source. It is not legal, medical, or compliance advice, and using it creates no attorney-client relationship. A summary can lag its source or leave out detail, and monitoring itself can be interrupted — so an absence of alerts means nothing reached you, not that nothing happened. Read the cited source, check its effective date, and confirm any change to your operations or clinical practice with qualified health-law counsel and your medical director. Legislative data via LegiScan (CC BY 4.0).