The British Pharmacological Society is working with e-Learning for Healthcare to provide an online training tool for all NHS doctors to practice their prescribing skills. This online training tool will be called the Prescribing Simulator.
Prescribing errors are common in the NHS and represent a major threat to patient safety. Many are preventable. Many of the more serious hospital prescribing errors involve inappropriate drug or dose selection that fail to take important patient factors into account. Most involve doctors who have recently graduated from medical school, making them an important potential target of intervention to improve patient safety. However, junior doctors are not the only target group. A General Medical Council (GMC) sponsored study suggested that nearly 1 in 10 hospital prescriptions contained errors, and that such errors were made by all grades of doctor.
The Prescribing Simulator is an online training environment that provides the opportunity for prescribers to practice in a simulated online environment at any time or place. Users are presented with clinical scenarios that require a prescription on a certain prescription form. The prescription is then automatically scored and feedback is provided to guide the user as to where future improvements can be made.
When running in formative or practice mode, users can select from the question bank the kinds of questions they would like to attempt. Alternatively, users can access online assessments to test themselves.
The Prescribing Simulator tool is currently in development. Please contact Lee Page for more information.