As busy medical professionals in a hospital, our work usually entails
writing numerous prescriptions per day. It is important that we maintain
good prescribing habits to ensure that our treatment modalities work,
and for our patients’ safety. The General Medical Council in the UK in
their latest 2013 Good practice in prescribing and managing medicines
and devices notes,
Good medical practice says that you must recognise and work
within the limits of your competence and that you must keep your
knowledge and skills up to date. You must maintain and develop the
knowledge and skills in pharmacology and therapeutics, as well as
prescribing and medicines management, relevant to your role and
prescribing practice…You should make use of electronic and other systems
that can improve the safety of your prescribing, for example by
highlighting interactions and allergies and by ensuring consistency and
compatibility of medicines prescribed, supplied and administered.
Good prescription habits should involve:
1.
The right medications for the right conditions
2.
The right dosage
3.
The right duration of treatment
4.
Awareness of side effects of medications
5.
Awareness of drug interactions for the said medications
6.
Clear prescriptions and instructions to the Pharmacy department.
7.
Checking the prescriptions and confirming it by adding our
signatures
8.
Ensuring patients take the medications appropriately
9.
Ensuring the staff in the wards give the medications as
instructed.
These habits are not something new but what we have been doing. However
we do need a reminder now and then to do a reappraisal as we are aware
that habits tend to slack due to familiarity, busyness, and a tendency
to take short cuts. The GMC (2013) further adds that “[y]ou
should make sure that anyone to whom you delegate responsibility for
dispensing medicines in your own practice is competent to do what you
ask of them”. Not only is it our responsibility to prescribe but
also to ensure that our patients receive our prescriptions appropriately
and accurately. We need to check that our ward staff are doing that.
