corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1847

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Pearson S, Smith AJ, Rolfe IE, Moulds RF, Shenfield GM.
Intern Prescribing for Common Clinical Conditions.
Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract 2000; 5:(2):141-150
http://www.springerlink.com/app/home/contribution.asp?wasp=e0f7248c20da438d88ea51c792f37dae&referrer=parent&backto=issue,6,7;journal,16,26;linkingpublicationresults,1:102840,1


Abstract:

To examine the ability of interns to prescribe appropriately for common clinical conditions at the commencement and completion of the intern year. Interns’ perceptions of their ability to prescribe and the perceived influences on their practices were also assessed. The study was conducted at a teaching hospital in urban New South Wales, Australia. A self-complete questionnaire was administered to 56 interns at the beginning and end of internship. At the beginning of the year respondents were asked to identify how equipped they felt they were to perform specific functions related to prescribing practice. Interns were also asked to write hospital prescriptions for four common clinical cases scenarios: post-operative pain, urinary tract infection, asthma, and community-acquired pneumonia. At the end of the year interns were asked to prescribe for the same clinical scenarios and also asked to identify the main influences on their practice. At the beginning of the year 54% of interns felt equipped to choose an appropriate drug for common clinical conditions, however, few felt they were able to determine the appropriate dose (23% of respondents) or dose frequency (25%). A previously validated four-point rating scale was used by two assessors to judge appropriateness of prescribing [Kappa = 0.6]. At the beginning of the year at least two-thirds of interns were prescribing ‘inappropriately’ for all clinical conditions. By the end of the year 75% were prescribing ‘appropriately’ for all conditions. The main perceived influences on prescribing practices were registrars, consultants, books and pharmacists.The use of hypothetical clinical cases to explore prescribing ability has shown that doctors are ill-equipped to perform various aspects of prescribing on graduating from medical school. Although our findings may not translate into practice directly they highlight the existence of a potential problem that warrants further study, especially in the areas of actual practice and the influences on it in the early postgraduate years.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909