Maine handles sedation inside a running list of Board practice determinations, not a document devoted to sedation: every use of the word sedation falls inside two of the page’s eighteen headed entries, “Anesthesia” and “Anesthetic Agents”. Its governing sentence: a registered nurse “may not administer anesthetic medications for the purpose of anesthesia unless the nurse is a certified registered nurse anesthetist” (§ Anesthetic Agents, April 10–11, 2002), while agents given for analgesia, muscle relaxation or sedation stay within RN practice on a documented-training condition the Board has left untouched through four later revisits, each about Propofol. The phrases moderate sedation and conscious sedation do not appear on the page.
Maine at a glance
| Board | Maine State Board of Nursing |
| Document | Practice Questions Related to Registered Professional Nurses — a page on the Board’s website; sedation sits in “Anesthesia” and “Anesthetic Agents”. No page numbers: citations name the section and Board meeting date. |
| Rule it applies | None cited. The page gives no rule, chapter or statute number anywhere; it names “the Law Regulating the Practice of Nursing” twice without a citation. |
| Status | The Board calls its anaesthesia determinations an “advisory ruling” (§ Anesthesia); it does not use that label in “Anesthetic Agents”, where the sedation conditions sit and where it calls its own 2006 position a “practice statement”. The page does not state what legal force either carries. Several entries are worded as limits: “administration of Propofol for nonventilated patients is restricted to certified registered nurse anesthetists” (§ Anesthetic Agents). |
| Dates | No page-level publication or revision date; entries are dated by Board meeting — 1993 and 2008 (§ Anesthesia); April 10–11, 2002, reviewed March 2, 2006 and March 3–4, 2010, then September 16–17, 2015 and August 10, 2017 (§ Anesthetic Agents), the latest date on any entry. |
| Who it covers | “the registered professional nurse (RN)” (§ Anesthesia). Both sedation entries also name the “certified registered nurse anesthetist”. |
| Who it does not cover | Neither sedation entry mentions licensed practical nurses. That is silence, not permission; the page’s practical-nurse language sits in other entries. |
| Settings the document names | The sedation entries name no care setting; they name clinical circumstances instead (mechanically ventilated patients, emergency intubation, a provider “present at the bedside” during rapid sequence intubation). Other entries do name settings of their own. |
| Re-verification interval | Not stated. Neither sedation entry sets an interval, a refresher or an expiry. The page’s one mention of periodic competency review belongs to a different procedure (§ PICCs). |
| Where the record lives | Not stated for sedation. The sedation entries condition the RN’s practice on training “based on the facility’s established policies and procedures” (§ Anesthetic Agents) without saying who holds the evidence. |
| CE hours | Not stated: no contact-hour count, no renewal-CE requirement, and the words continuing education do not appear on the page. Neither sedation entry requires a named course; the nearest thing is the 2017 expectation that an RN assisting with rapid sequence intubation be competent in “advanced cardiopulmonary resuscitation” (§ Anesthetic Agents) — a body of knowledge, not a certificate. That is a statement about the sedation entries, not about the whole page: other entries name preparation of their own, § Gastric Band and § Epidural Catheters among them, and none speaks for sedation. |
What the Maine State Board of Nursing says
In 2002 the Board “reiterated” the anaesthesia line above, then allowed that “a registered professional nurse may administer anesthetic agents, such as Diprivan, for the purpose of analgesia, muscle relaxation, or sedation” subject to a training condition (§ Anesthetic Agents, April 10–11, 2002). At the March 2006 review it “rescinded a portion of its previous position” — the Propofol portion — leaving the remainder:
“Other agents used for the purpose of analgesia, muscle relaxation or sedation may continue to be administered by the registered professional nurse”
Maine State Board of Nursing — § Anesthetic Agents (“Reviewed March 2, 2006.”)
The 2002 condition travels with those other agents: the nurse must have “received the appropriate documented training based on the facility’s established policies and procedures” (§ Anesthetic Agents). For those agents that clause is the whole of what the Board asks — no curriculum, course, examination or hour count, no approving body, no custodian for the record. Propofol is the exception, with conditions of its own, set out below.
What a Maine facility should be able to show
Those two entries translate into three records for an RN who administers a non-Propofol agent for moderate sedation. Note what the Board has taken off that list: for a non-ventilated patient Propofol is a CRNA task.
- A written facility sedation policy — “the facility’s established policies and procedures”, the phrase the Board’s 2002 sedation condition hangs on.
- Per-nurse evidence of documented training for every RN who administers a non-Propofol agent for moderate sedation — the training condition the 2002 entry attaches, still in force for the agents the 2006 review left with the registered nurse.
- Per-nurse evidence that the moderate-sedation competence is current, on an interval your own policy names, because this document names none.
Those three records cover one use of those agents; the Board’s wording is wider. The agents the 2006 review left with the registered nurse are those used “for the purpose of analgesia, muscle relaxation or sedation” (§ Anesthetic Agents); the entry states no depth of sedation, so it is not limited to moderate sedation. Analgesia, muscle relaxation and sedation deeper than moderate are separate uses; the training a facility files has to match the use the nurse is prepared for, and evidence for those other uses is not what records 2 and 3 are.
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 Maine facilities ask
Does the Maine Board set a renewal interval for sedation competency?
No. Neither sedation entry states an interval, a refresher or an expiry, and no other entry supplies one. This document sets no interval for sedation competency, so the one in your policy is your own; a dated certificate makes it visible on a roster.
Can a Maine RN administer Propofol for a procedure?
Not for a non-ventilated patient. Since June 4, 2010, “administration of Propofol for nonventilated patients is restricted to certified registered nurse anesthetists” (§ Anesthetic Agents), the Board’s reason being that Propofol given for analgesia, muscle relaxation or sedation “may rapidly lead to deep sedation and or short duration general anesthesia requiring intubation”. The Board supports RN administration “only in the following circumstances: to intubate; to maintain sedation for mechanically ventilated patients; and, to sedate or those patients undergoing emergency intubation”. Two later entries add conditioned exceptions: palliative sedation for a do-not-resuscitate patient on comfort care measures only, conditioned on a completed competency-based education and training programme in administering and monitoring palliative care sedation with the first dose given by a physician, nurse practitioner or nurse anesthetist (September 16–17, 2015); and administering Propofol for a provider “present at the bedside” but occupied with airway management during rapid sequence intubation, “provided the RN has the educational preparation and clinical competence to inject such agents” (August 10, 2017). Other agents remain available to the RN on the documented-training condition.
Does Maine require the CSRN™ course?
No. Neither sedation entry requires a particular course. For the non-Propofol agents the Board asks only for “the appropriate documented training based on the facility’s established policies and procedures” (§ Anesthetic Agents), and it does not define what that evidence looks like; the Propofol circumstances carry conditions of their own but name no programme. No state mandates this specific course. CSRN™ is designed to be that evidence for moderate sedation.
Compliance note (last reviewed September 2026): This page is educational information about the Maine State Board of Nursing’s Practice Questions Related to Registered Professional Nurses, not legal advice or a compliance determination. Every quotation was checked word-for-word against the Board’s own page at maine.gov on 2026-09-02; the page carries no page numbers and no publication date, so citations name section headings and Board meeting dates, and irregular spelling and grammar inside quotation marks is the Board’s own. The findings above — no interval, no CE requirement, no record location for sedation and no course named for it — are statements about this document’s two sedation entries, read against all eighteen. The Board’s Position Statements and Advisory Rulings indexes were checked the same day and list nothing sedation-specific. None of that is a statement about every Maine agency: facility licensure and other regulators set their own requirements and are outside this page’s scope. The Board can revise an entry at any meeting; confirm the current text and your facility policy before relying on this summary. No state mandates this specific course.