Meeting the challenge of prescribing and administering medicines safely: structured teaching and assessment for final year medical students

Objectives To promote safe prescribing and administration of medicines in the pre‐registration house officer (PRHO) year through a programme of structured teaching and assessment for final year medical students. Design  Forty final year medical students from two medical schools were randomly allocated either to participate in a pharmacist facilitated teaching session or to receive no additional teaching. Teaching comprised five practical exercises covering seven skills through which students rotated in small groups. One month later, a random sample of 16 taught and 16 non‐taught students participated in a nine‐station objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) to assess the impact of the teaching. Setting  Manchester School of Medicine (MSM), and Kings College School of Medicine and Dentistry (KCSMD). Participants  Final year medical student volunteers. Main outcome measures  The need for teaching as indicated by student prior experience; questionnaire rating of student acceptability of teaching and assessment; self‐rating of student confidence post‐assessment, and student performance assessed by OSCE. Results  The study demonstrated that the taught group achieved higher scores in eight OSCE stations. Four of these were statistically significant ( P  < = 0.005). Taught students felt more confident performing the skills on five stations. From 0 to 47.5% students had prior experience of the skills taught. The post‐teaching questionnaire evaluated exercises positively on several criteria, including provision of new information and relevance to future work. Conclusions  Structured teaching provided an effective and acceptable method of teaching the medicines management skills needed in the PRHO year. The structured approach complemented variable precourse clinical experience.