Among the statutes and rules the Indiana State Board of Nursing lists for nurses there is no sedation document — no position statement, no advisory opinion, no practice guideline. The nursing practice statute among them, IC 25-23, does not use the word sedation once in twenty-five pages. That absence is the finding: an Indiana facility’s sedation standard is not set by a Board sedation document, because there is none. What Article 23 does set is a scope definition and an accountability standard, quoted below with page numbers.
Indiana at a glance
| Board | Indiana State Board of Nursing (p. 4) |
| Document | IC 25-23, Article 23. Nurses — Indiana Code 2026 edition (PDF, 25 pp.); page numbers refer to it. The Board lists no sedation document alongside it. |
| Rule it is | A statute. IC 25-23-1 licenses nurses, creates the Board and directs it to adopt rules that “Prescribe standards for the competent practice of registered, practical, and advanced practice registered nursing” (p. 6). |
| Status | Law — the Indiana Code, force of statute, not a position statement. Its verbs are mixed rather than uniformly mandatory: “The board shall do the following” (p. 5) against “The board may do the following” (p. 6), and its one anaesthesia provision is permissive (p. 23). |
| Dates | Indiana Code 2026 edition. No single adoption or revision date — each section prints its own history; 2026 public laws appear in Chapter 1 (“P.L.89-2026, SEC.1”, p. 4). |
| Who it covers | Registered nurses, licensed practical nurses and advanced practice registered nurses. An LPN is one “who functions at the direction of” a registered nurse, physician, dentist, chiropractor, optometrist or podiatrist (p. 3). |
| Who it does not cover | Section 27.1(b) lists eleven things the chapter “does not prohibit” (pp. 21–22) — among them “furnishing nursing assistance in an emergency” (p. 21) and, within the delegating professional’s own scope, tasks delegated or ordered by licensed health professionals to persons providing health care services (p. 22). |
| Settings the document names | It names no procedural setting: ambulatory, endoscopy and office-based do not appear in the article at all. The settings it does name, such as “hospital outpatient clinics and health maintenance organizations” (p. 2), appear in no connection with sedation. |
| Re-verification interval | Not stated for sedation, and the article sets no competency interval for general registered nursing practice either. The cycles it does fix are licensure (p. 13) and role-based — prescriptive authority (p. 15), forensic nurse (p. 25), CRNA recertification (p. 4) — none of them a sedation interval. |
| Where the record lives | Not stated. The article names no competency file, and the word employer does not appear in it. Its filings run to the board, not to an employer file (pp. 17, 25). |
| CE hours | None stated for renewing an RN or LPN licence — “The procedures and fee for renewal shall be set by the board” (p. 13). Its only contact-hour counts belong to prescriptive authority (p. 16). |
What Article 23 says about the registered nurse
Article 23 defines registered nursing as “performance of services which include but are not limited to” (p. 2) eight numbered activities — assessment, nursing diagnosis, executing a nursing regimen, advocacy, executing delegated regimens, teaching, delegation, and “performing acts which are approved by the board or by the board in collaboration with the medical licensing board of Indiana” (p. 3). That list neither names a moderate-sedation role nor closes the question: it is expressly open-ended. What the article does state plainly is where accountability sits.
“a person who holds a valid license issued under this chapter or IC 25-42 and who bears primary responsibility and accountability for nursing practices based on specialized knowledge, judgment, and skill derived from the principles of biological, physical, and behavioral sciences”
IC 25-23-1-1.1(a), defining “registered nurse” — Indiana Code 2026, Article 23. Nurses, p. 2
Where Indiana’s sedation language sits
Article 23’s one section about administering anaesthesia is IC 25-23-1-30 (p. 23): “A certified registered nurse anesthetist may administer anesthesia if the certified registered nurse anesthetist acts under the direction of and in the immediate presence of a physician” (p. 23). That condition — physician direction and immediate presence — is set for the certified registered nurse anesthetist. Because the word sedation appears nowhere in the article, Article 23 does not address who may administer it.
Two other Indiana documents matter here; neither is a nursing sedation rule. The first is the Board’s standards rule, 848 IAC 2: paraphrased, it directs the registered nurse to function within the legal boundaries of nursing practice and to accept responsibility for individual nursing actions and continued competence (848 IAC 2-2-2(1)–(2)). It does not mention sedation either — it is the general competence standard the Board does publish, and the Board publishes no more specific one.
The second belongs to the medical licensing board, not the nursing board. Paraphrased from IC 25-22.5-2-9(a)–(c): an accreditation requirement for an office-based setting does not apply where anaesthesia in a physician, podiatrist or dental office is provided by an anesthesiologist, by a certified registered nurse anesthetist under the direction of and in the immediate presence of a physician, or by an anesthesiologist assistant, and then only if subsection (c)’s standards are met. A registered nurse who is not a CRNA is not among the three named. It is an exemption from an accreditation requirement, not a statewide prohibition, and it does not reach hospitals or ambulatory surgery centres — nor does Article 23. Facility licensure there belongs to a different regulator, and this page does not summarise it.
What an Indiana facility should be able to show
Neither Article 23 nor the Board’s standards rule names a sedation record; what your facility licence and your accreditor ask for is a separate question this page does not answer. Your sedation policy still has to define these three:
- A written moderate-sedation policy naming the agents, the monitoring, the rescue plan and who may do what — the nursing statute supplies none of that.
- Per-nurse evidence of initial education and training for every registered nurse who administers or monitors moderate sedation.
- Per-nurse evidence of continuing competence, on an interval your own policy names — Article 23 states none, and the Board’s standards rule places continued competence on the individual nurse (848 IAC 2-2-2(2)).
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 Indiana facilities ask
Does the Indiana State Board of Nursing publish a moderate sedation position statement?
No. On the Board’s own page at in.gov (checked 2026-09-02) what it lists for nurses is statutes — IC 25-23, IC 25-1, IC 25-0.5, IC 25-42, IC 35-48, IC 4-6-14 — and Title 848 of the Administrative Code; no position statement, advisory opinion or practice guideline among them, and the word sedation is not stated anywhere in Article 23. An aggregator offering an Indiana sedation rule is quoting another regulator’s document or a private standard; check what it is before relying on it.
Does Indiana set a renewal interval for sedation competency?
No. Article 23 does not set a competency interval for sedation, and sets none for general registered nursing practice. The recurring date it fixes for every registered nurse is a licence date (p. 13). Where it does set a recurring education cycle, it attaches to a particular role rather than to a task: “a biennial forensic nursing educational program” (p. 25), the contact hours that renew prescriptive authority (p. 16), and biennial recertification inside the CRNA definition (p. 4). None of them is a sedation interval. The interval you write into your sedation policy is therefore your own.
Does Indiana require the CSRN™ course specifically?
No. Article 23 requires no sedation course, and no state mandates this specific course. It does name educational programmes — those for which the Board is to “Prescribe standards and approve curricula” (p. 5), and the nurse-anaesthesia programme inside the CRNA definition (p. 4) — but neither is a moderate-sedation course. CSRN™ is designed to be the evidence your own policy asks for: a named credential, assessed competency and an employer-verifiable certificate ID.
Compliance note (last reviewed September 2026): This page is educational information about IC 25-23, Article 23. Nurses, Indiana Code 2026 edition, not legal advice or a compliance determination. Every quotation was checked word-for-word against the Indiana General Assembly’s 2026 Article 23 PDF on 2026-09-02; page numbers refer to that PDF. The passages taken from 848 IAC 2 and IC 25-22.5-2-9 are paraphrased, labelled and linked separately: different documents, and in the second case a different board. The Indiana Code is republished by edition year; confirm the current edition and your own facility policy before relying on this summary. No state mandates this specific course.