Lack in the Essential Prescribing Competency Skills of the Medical Students: An Important Factor Contributing to the Medication Errors and How to Overcome it

A BSTRACT Introduction: Writing a prescription is one of the primary acts of the practicing doctor, and medication errors are the worst errors among the doctors leading to unacceptable and detrimental affect not only on the patient’s health but also on the patient’s confidence in the healthcare system leading to further burden on the overall health status of the community. The study identifies the prevalence of different types and causes of the prescription errors among the interns and various methods to overcome it. Materials and Methods: A prospective and observational study was conducted on 100 interns. Five hundred prescriptions written by interns were collected from May 2021 to October 2021 and evaluated for different types of prescription errors based on the World Health Organization (WHO) criteria, National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention (NCC MERP) criteria, and also for different general criteria. Furthermore, a questionnaire was given to the interns for the analysis of self-perceived prescription skills on the scale of 10. Results: Different types of prescription errors were found in maximum prescriptions. Most of them were clinically insignificant as per the NCC MERP criteria. Among these, most of the errors were drug related, with polypharmacy topping the list. Next follows the errors related to drug interaction and contraindicated drugs. Regarding self-perceived prescription skills, students had the lowest score in terms of knowledge related to pharmacological drug interaction and drugs contraindicated in specific conditions. Conclusion: Medication errors are very common, especially by junior doctors that can have an adverse effect on the health outcome of the patients. Educating the junior doctors regarding medication errors, their types, WHO guidelines help improving the work environment, and decreasing the workload will have an impact on decreasing the prescription errors. Conducting a workshop on Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics just before starting internship will help in freshening up the already learned knowledge adding on to the present clinical exposure and help in decreasing the prescription errors.