Prescribing & Medicines Management
Issue no 1, p4
January/February 2003

This article
Reprint
Photocopy

News summary

Educators express concern over teaching prescribing skills

Members of the academic pharmacy group have voiced their concerns over how the teaching of prescribing skills will be incorporated into the undergraduate degree course for pharmacy students.

Judy Cantrill, professor of medicines (usage, evaluation and policy), Manchester University, believes one problem facing pharmacy undergraduates is that they experience pharmacy as it is practised today, not as it will be in the future. "Students cannot conceptualise what they will be doing in practice," she said.

Professor Cantrill thinks that using examples of the clinical management plan template designed for use by supplementary prescribers will help students face up to what their responsibilities will be in the future. She does not think schools of pharmacy will be able to teach communication skills to the level required for effective prescribing. "There are some things we can do but we need to get students with patients as early as we can."

Other skills taught by schools that Professor Cantrill thinks are relevant to the prescribing curriculum include reflective practice, team working and documentation skills. Students at Manchester are already encouraged to work together to produce posters and complete projects.

However, the team working skills specified within the prescribing curriculum relate to the ability to work with other professionals, something that pharmacy students rarely experience. "We have schools of everything but little multidisiplinary learning," she said.

Preparing students for the task of documenting their prescribing activities will also be a challenge. "Pharmacists are the only professional group who don't [document their work] and students don't see pharmacists doing it."

Professor Cantrill also says that the profession must be realistic about the declining number of academic pharmacists who will be available to teach students the required skills.

Dr Dai John, head of clinical pharmacy, law, ethics and practice at the Welsh School of Pharmacy, Cardiff, believes that most of the curriculum for pharmacist supplementary prescribers is covered within pharmacy degree courses already. "We need to re-engineer what we do," he said.

However, he warned that focusing more on prescribing would mean that less attention would have to be given to other components.