One of the key challenges facing medical education is ensuring that medical graduates are equipped with the knowledge, skills and confidence to prescribe safely and accurately.
Studies by the GMC have indicated that new doctors are often poorly prepared for prescribing and that First and Second Year Foundation Doctors prescribe with error rates of 8% and 10% respectively.
Over the last 7 years, a team of clinical pharmacists and pharmacologists at UoB have worked with Health Education England and developers OCB Media to put together SCRIPT (Standard Computerised Revalidation Instrument for Prescribing and Therapeutics), an e-learning toolkit aimed at training foundation doctors to become safer prescribers.
SCRIPT is now being used all Foundation schools in England to train junior doctors to prescribe safely and appropriately, as well as by 10 out of 33 Medical Schools in the UK to complement their undergraduate teaching. In addition, several programme variants have been spawned aimed at other healthcare professionals including nurses, paediatricians and dental practitioners.
While designed for trainee doctors, initial data on using SCRIPT at undergraduate level showed that it helped to improve students’ knowledge and understanding of key topics within prescribing. One medical student was so impressed with the programme that he contacted the SCRIPT team to say that “it one of the best online resources that is available, and is extremely useful for revision. I have learned so much from it already.”