A pharmacotherapy self‐assessment improves prescribing by prompting junior doctors to study further

Abstract

Inappropriate pharmacotherapy is common and is an important cause of harm to patients. The incidence of preventable adverse drug events is high worldwide, with rates ranging from 16.5 to 52.9%. [1][2][3] It is also estimated that 70% of preventable adverse drug events are due to inappropriate prescribing. 4,5 Junior doctors working in secondary care, who write out most prescriptions in hospital, prescribe incorrectly in 8-10% of cases, sometimes with fatal consequences. 6,7 One reason for these errors is that junior doctors tend to base their drug choices on examples learned from their medical teachers instead of on their own autonomous therapeutic reasoning. 8 Moreover, junior doctors themselves do not feel well prepared to prescribe after graduation,

Evaluating the UK’s first national prescribing assessment for GPs in training using an online survey

“… 6 , 7 Feedback has been shown to reduce prescribing errors among doctors-in-training and postgraduate doctors in secondary care, 15 , 16 with Ferguson et al 17 concluding that effective feedback is timely and provides a benchmark against which a participant can compare their prescribing performance. Although health care workers (physicians) may not accurately assess their own performance, 18 Van der Steen et al 19 recently reported that self-assessment of prescribing by junior doctors significantly reduced potentially harmful prescriptions in secondary care.…”