Competency and confidence are two key words when
pharmacists come to prescribe. With the first pharmacists now in training,
the report on p5 about the prescribing behaviour of other health care
professionals is instructive.
GPs admit that as many as 20 per cent of their prescriptions are not necessary.
Even more worrying is the fact that junior doctors do not rate prescribing
as a particularly risky activity.
Perhaps neither of these two points are surprising bearing in mind that
little of the undergraduate medical course is devoted to therapeutics and
at no time are junior doctors specifically taught how to prescribe or their
skills tested.
Nurses, who have come to prescribing more recently, face different problems.
Included in those is that although they have access to a reasonably wide
range of drugs through the formulary, they only prescribe from a narrow
band because they do not feel confident to use products they do not know.
Pharmacists who are on the brink of becoming supplementary prescribers,
in theory, should not have any of those problems, as their knowledge of
therapeutics is so much greater. Let us hope so.
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