Get ahead! The Prescribing Safety Assessment

Muneeb Choudhry, Nicholas Rubek Fuggle, Amar Iqbal

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315353876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Medizinische Theorie, Praxis & Referenz

Get ahead! The Prescribing Safety Assessment is an invaluable practice aid for students preparing for final exams. Written by an experienced team of authors under the guidance of series editor Saran Shantikumar, it covers two examinations' worth of questions matching the exact format of the Prescribing Safety Assessment (PSA). Candidates can work through the practice papers systematically or dip in and out of the book using the index as a guide to questions on a specific topic.

Introduction

Prescribing forms a major part of the workload of doctors in their foundation years; it is a complex task which requires careful attention and due diligence. It requires you as a prescriber to be familiar with the use, side effect profile and risks and benefits of various medications.

The prescribing process is full of dangers, and literature shows prescribing errors to be part of this. A recent study (EQUIP) found that 9% of hospital prescriptions contained an error. With this in mind, the General Medical Council initially (in 2013) piloted and has now (in 2014) put into place a national prescribing safety assessment that allows you to demonstrate your core prescribing competencies. The assessment is a joint collaboration between the British Pharmacological Society and the Medical Schools Council that aims to allow for safe and effective prescribing for the betterment of patient health.

Core prescribing competencies include, among others:

• Writing new prescriptions

• Reviewing existing prescriptions

• Amending prescriptions to suit individual patient profiles

• Identifying adverse drug reactions

• Identifying and avoiding medication errors

• Calculating doses

Medical schools still have the choice of compiling their own equivalent exam, which has to be of the same or higher level of difficulty, to assess the same competencies (as judged by an external panel). This may be in an electronic or written format which will provide a small degree of variation in technique required to complete the assessment. This is due to the fact that you may be clicking with a mouse on boxes or opening the Electronic British National Formulary (eBNF) on a computer-based exam, as opposed to filling in boxes with a pencil and physically turning the pages of the BNF hard copy, in the written format.

Using the BNF and eBNF as much as possible during the revision period is extremely helpful, as the more familiar you are with the formats and tools embedded within it, the less time you will spend searching during the exam.

STRUCTURE OF PSA

The PSA is marked as either ‘pass’ or ‘fail’. It assesses the skills, judgement and supporting knowledge that relate to medical prescribing of all final-year medical students. It consists of eight different question types, each of which is defined under seven subsets of clinical activity:

Question type	Clinical activity subset
Prescribing Prescription Review Planning Management Communicating Information Calculation Skills Adverse Drug Reactions Drug Monitoring Data Interpretation	Medicine Surgery Elderly Care Paediatrics Psychiatry Obstetrics and Gynaecology General...