the prescribing skills assessment - a requirement for life
TRANSCRIPT
Letter to the Editors
The Prescribing Skills Assessment – a requirementfor life
Neel Sharma
Centre for Medical Education, Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, London, UK
The Prescribing Skills Assessment pilot was successfullycompleted in June 2013 with under 5000 medical studentstaking part. Its introduction as a possible form of assess-ment came courtesy of a General Medical Council studynoting that 9% of hospital prescriptions contained errors[1] and that prescribing per se was an area that new gradu-ates found the most challenging [2]. The aim of the Pre-scribing Skills Assessment is to address such concerns andallow students to demonstrate competency in the safe andeffective use of medicines.
This is all well and good close to graduation, but whatabout in practice? After all, clinicians will be expected todemonstrate such competencies well into retirement.With evolution at play and newer and more purposefultherapeutic agents being developed, surely it makes sensefor such an assessment to be introduced in postgraduatetraining? With a rising elderly population, increasingcomplexity of chronic illness and the prevalence ofpolypharmacy, prescribing assessment should certainlynot be a once-only routine.
As a clinician myself, it is all too common to lambast ourstudents for their lack of knowledge or skills, but the realityis that postgraduates themselves are barely assessed. Itwould seem sensible for such enquiry to take place on aregular basis to ensure that our patients are being pro-vided with the best care, which is effective not only froman investigative perspective but also from a therapeuticone.
Competing Interests
All authors have completed the Unified Competing Inter-est form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf (available
on request from the corresponding author) and declare:no support from any organization for the submitted work;no financial relationships with any organizations thatmight have an interest in the submitted work in the previ-ous 3 years; no other relationships or activities that couldappear to have influenced the submitted work.
REFERENCES
1 Available at http://www.gmc-uk.org/about/research/research_commissioned_4.asp (last accessed 19 August2013).
2 Available at http://www.gmc-uk.org/about/research/research_commissioned_1.asp (last accessed 19 August2013).
RECEIVED19 August 2013
ACCEPTED10 September 2013
ACCEPTED ARTICLE PUBLISHED ONLINE25 December 2013
CORRESPONDENCEDr Neel Sharma BSc (Hons), MBChB, MSc, MRCP (UK), Centre forMedical Education, Barts and the London School of Medicineand Dentistry, London E1 2AD, UK.Tel.: +44(0)20 7882 2517Fax: +44(0)20 7117 4571E-mail: [email protected]
British Journal of ClinicalPharmacology
DOI:10.1111/bcp.12315
430 / Br J Clin Pharmacol / 78:2 / 430 © 2013 The British Pharmacological Society