If you are not a prescriber, the person who prescribes for your patients is the most important professional relationship you have. It is worth setting up properly rather than improvising.
Start with what the arrangement legally requires. The prescriber has to physically examine each patient before prescribing. Not review a form, not look at a photograph, not speak on the telephone. The General Medical Council's guidance for doctors offering cosmetic interventions states that you must not prescribe injectable cosmetic medicines by telephone, video link, online or at the request of others for patients you have not examined. The equivalent position applies across the other regulators, so switching to a nurse prescriber does not change it.
That single requirement shapes everything else. It means your prescriber has to be physically present, or the patient has to attend them separately, on the days you treat. Any arrangement that skips this is not a shortcut, it is a regulatory problem waiting to surface.
So the practical questions to settle before you start. Where does the examination happen, and does the patient understand they are seeing two people? Who pays the prescriber, and is it per patient, per session or a retainer? What happens when your prescriber is on holiday, and do you have a second? Who holds the prescription record, and how does it link to your clinical notes?
Write the answers down. A short written agreement covering scope, availability, fees, record keeping and what happens if either of you wants out prevents most of the friction that ends these relationships.
On choosing someone, competence in prescribing is not the same as competence in aesthetics. A prescriber who has never worked in this field may not recognise when a patient is unsuitable, or may be uncomfortable declining someone you have already consulted. Ask what they will do if they disagree with your treatment plan. The answer tells you whether the arrangement will work under pressure.
There is a version of this relationship that is essentially a rubber stamp, where the prescriber appears, signs, and leaves. Avoid it. If something goes wrong, the prescriber's judgment will be examined alongside yours, and an arrangement that looks like a formality reads very badly in retrospect.
Money is worth being direct about. Prescribers charge for their time and their risk, and rates vary widely. Build it into your treatment pricing from the start rather than absorbing it and discovering your margins are thinner than you thought.
Hyaluronidase deserves its own conversation. It is also a prescription-only medicine, so you need a route to obtaining it that does not depend on tracking someone down in an emergency. Agree in advance how you hold it, who prescribes it, and what happens at seven on a Friday evening.
The alternative to all of this is becoming a prescriber yourself. For nurses that means the V300 independent prescribing qualification, which requires at least one year on the NMC register and commonly takes around eight months part-time through a university. It costs money and time, and it changes your economics more than any injectable course will. Plenty of people conclude it is the better investment once they have worked under an arrangement for a year and seen what it costs them in fees and scheduling.