The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 270 No 7255 p880
28 June 2003

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New guidance recommends improved training in prescribing for doctors

New recommendations to improve prescribing training for medical students have been set out this week.

The recommendations follow changes to the structure of the medical undergraduate course in the 1990s. This resulted in increased emphasis on problem-based education. The authors of the recommendations — Dr Simon Maxwell, clinical pharmacology unit, University of Edinburgh, and Professor Tom Walley, department of pharmacology and therapeutics, University of Liverpool — believe that one consequence of this redesign was "the loss of single-discipline courses including basic pharmacology and clinical pharmacology and therapeutics".

This view is backed by the British Pharmacological Society, which says that training in the basic principles of prescribing and therapeutics, drug action and basic knowledge about commonly used drugs is failing.

Dr Maxwell and Professor Walley suggest that:

• Prescribing and therapeutics should be identified as an important theme that runs vertically through the medical curriculum

• The factual burden should be eased by prioritising learning around a core list of commonly used drugs

• Core learning objectives should be set and robustly assessed

They go on to describe in detail what the medical curriculum should cover. The recommendations will be distributed to medical schools and are published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology (2003;55:496).

Commenting on the publication of the recommendations, the President of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, Dr Gill Hawksworth, said: "These new recommendations can only be a good thing for patient safety and quality of patient care."