This review found nothing about moderate sedation in what Colorado’s nursing regulator publishes — its Practice Act, its rulebook, its board-policies manual and its scope-of-practice statements were all checked on 2026-09-02 — and for a facility educator that absence is the finding. The word sedation does not occur anywhere in its Nurse and Nurse Aide Practice Act. Colorado regulates procedural sedation through the department that licenses the facility, not the board that licenses the nurse — CDPHE’s 6 CCR 1011-1, paraphrased below.
Colorado at a glance
| Board | Colorado State Board of Nursing. No sedation-specific document from it — no rule, position statement or policy (checked 2026-09-02). |
| Document | No sedation document from the Board of Nursing, so this guide is built on the general one: the Nurse and Nurse Aide Practice Act, C.R.S. Title 12, Article 255 — the 59-page PDF on the Board’s Nursing Laws page, headed “Uncertified Printout” and “Colorado Revised Statutes 2025” (p. 1). Page numbers refer to it. |
| Rule it is | The statute itself — sections 12-255-101 to 12-255-215. It mentions sedation nowhere, and sets no competency standard for any clinical task. |
| Status | Binding statute, not advisory: unlicensed practice as a nurse or certified midwife is unlawful (p. 39). Discipline reaches practice “in a manner that fails to meet generally accepted standards for the practice of nursing” (p. 32) — content it never supplies for a procedure. |
| Dates | Recodified in 2019 (p. 1). Newest session laws here are 2025 — SB 25-146 (p. 17), HB 25-1024 (p. 49). Its own end date: “This article 255 is repealed, effective September 1, 2027” (p. 48). |
| Who it covers | Everyone licensed under Part 1 — registered professional nurse, advanced practice registered nurse, certified midwife, and the practical nurse, whose practice is “under the supervision of a licensed health-care provider authorized to practice in this state” (p. 5). |
| Who it does not cover | Not addressed — the Act carves nobody out of sedation practice because it does not address sedation practice. Its exclusions (pp. 40–42) are about other things: family care, emergency assistance, students, federal employees, medication in certain title 25 facilities (p. 41). |
| Settings the document names | Nursing is not tied to a setting — professional nursing is delivered “in all settings” (p. 5). Settings appear elsewhere, none in connection with sedation: schools, “family child care homes” and others among the exclusions (p. 41). |
| Re-verification interval | Not stated in the Act, which attaches no interval to competence in any clinical task. It uses two-year windows, licence renewal (p. 43) among them, but none re-checks a skill. The Board’s rules do set an annual re-demonstration, for a certified nurse aide’s expanded-scope tasks rather than for an RN administering moderate sedation — see record 3. |
| Where the record lives | Not stated. The Act names no competency record, file or custodian for any procedure; its one retention duty is on medical-aesthetic consent forms, kept “for at least seven years” (p. 49). Employer policy appears only as something that may limit or prohibit delegations in specified circumstances (p. 46). |
| CE hours | None for sedation, and none imposed by the Act — it caps what the Board may ask: “no more than twenty hours of continuing education every two years as a condition of renewal of licenses” (p. 43). |
What the Nurse and Nurse Aide Practice Act says
The Act works by definition, not by a list of permitted acts — leaving no natural place for a sedation rule:
“the delivery of independent and collaborative nursing care to individuals of all ages, families, groups, and communities, whether sick or well, in all settings”
C.R.S. § 12-255-104(10)(a) — the practice of professional nursing (p. 5)
The activities it does name — epinephrine auto-injectors and gastrostomy-tube nutrition (p. 41), school medication (p. 46), medical-aesthetic services (p. 49) — are exclusions or disclosure duties, never a competency standard for a clinical task. The nearest it comes to this page’s subject is a savings clause on prescriptive authority: “Nothing in this section shall be construed to require a registered nurse or certified midwife to obtain prescriptive authority to deliver anesthesia care” (p. 20) — prescribing, not competence, and anesthesia care is not the moderate sedation this page is about. It is the only place the word anesthesia appears in all 59 pages.
Where Colorado’s sedation language lives
CDPHE’s facility rules at 6 CCR 1011-1 license the facility, not the nurse, and are never a Colorado requires statement about a licence. Paraphrased: in an ambulatory surgical center, Chapter 20 § 13.6 puts an RN or CRNA qualified in peri-operative nursing in each operating or procedure room, dedicated solely to monitoring the patient, with a separate provision (§ 13.6(B)(2)) allowing a technician or nurse to give minor assistance, on stated conditions, during a procedure using no more than moderate sedation. Chapter 9 does the same for community clinics: Part 17 reaches any clinic that provides anesthesia services — defined at § 2.1 to include procedural sedation — and every community clinic providing emergency services (§ 17.1).
What a Colorado facility should be able to show
With no sedation standard from the Board of Nursing, your practice is measured against your facility’s own policy and its licensing regulator’s rules. Three records:
- Your own moderate-sedation policy, dated and approved — who may administer, under whose order, what is monitored and recorded, what equipment is at hand. A community clinic offering anesthesia services has to have policies and procedures on those topics (6 CCR 1011-1 ch. 9, §§ 2.1, 17.1(A), 17.3); elsewhere it is what a surveyor reads in place of a nursing-board standard.
- Per-nurse evidence of initial education and training for every RN who administers or monitors moderate sedation. The Act measures nursing by “specialized knowledge, judgment, and skill” (p. 5) without defining that for any task, and the Board’s scope-of-practice self-assessment asks whether a nurse not taught the skill in the basic program has since completed comprehensive training with clinical experience.
- Per-nurse evidence of ongoing competence, on an interval your own policy names — the Act sets none, and neither the Board’s rules nor its policies set one for an RN administering moderate sedation. The rules do set one for the certified nurse aide: paraphrasing 3 CCR 716-1 Rules 1.10 and 1.13, the aide re-demonstrates the expanded-scope tasks under an RN’s or APRN’s direct clinical observation not less than annually. Written for the aide’s tasks; for an RN administering moderate sedation there is no equivalent.
The CSRN™ course — 10 CE contact hours developed and delivered by Capt. M. Ron Eslinger, CRNA, with module exams, case studies and a certificate ID your credentialing office can verify — is built to be records 2 and 3 on that list. Facility seats and roster tracking →
Questions Colorado facilities ask
Does Colorado set a renewal interval for sedation competency?
No. The Act sets none — it never mentions sedation — and the only recurring requirement it attaches to a nurse’s licence itself sits at renewal, where it authorises the Board to require no more than twenty CE hours every two years (p. 43). The interval in your policy is your own.
Does Colorado require the CSRN™ course specifically?
No. Beyond pre-licensure (p. 13), the Act asks education of an already-licensed nurse only in narrow situations, neither of them a competency standard for a procedure: a hearings panel may order “therapy or courses of training or education as may be needed to correct deficiencies” (p. 29), and an APRN seeking prescriptive authority must evidence board-set education in controlled substances plus a 750-hour “mutually structured prescribing mentorship” (p. 18). No state mandates this specific course. Because the Board names no sedation training, it names no substitute either; CSRN™ is designed to be that evidence.
If the Board is silent, what decides whether a Colorado RN may administer moderate sedation?
Three things, none of them a sedation rule from the Board: the Act, which defines nursing by knowledge and judgment rather than by permitted acts and whose generally-accepted-standards discipline ground (p. 32) it never fills in for a procedure; the Board’s scope test, whose questions include your training records and your facility’s policy manual; and the facility — its policy, its privileging, and the CDPHE chapter that licenses it.
Compliance note (last reviewed September 2026): This page is educational information about Colorado’s Nurse and Nurse Aide Practice Act, not legal advice or a compliance determination. Every quotation was checked word-for-word on 2026-09-02 against that 59-page printout. The Board’s Scope of Practice Statements, its rules at 3 CCR 716-1, its Board Policies manual and CDPHE’s 6 CCR 1011-1 are paraphrased, never quoted, and were checked the same day; the no-sedation-document finding about the Board rests on them. The Act repeals itself on September 1, 2027 — confirm the current text, and your own facility policy, before relying on this summary. No state mandates this specific course.