Reducing prescribing errors through medical education

Reducing prescribing errors through creatinine clearance alert redesign.

BACKGROUND Literature has shown that computerized creatinine clearance alerts reduce errors during prescribing, and applying human factors principles may further reduce errors. Our objective was to apply human factors principles to creatinine clearance alert design and assess whether the redesigned alerts increase usability and reduce prescribing errors compared with the original alerts. METH...

Reducing prescribing costs through computer controlled repeat prescribing.

A small reduction in prescribing costs is reported from a general practice that has been using a computer for repeat prescribing for three years. The possible reasons for this are discussed. The information available from the Prescription Pricing Authority (PPA) and from practice workload measurements was found to be inconclusive. An elaboration of the computer-controlled system of repeat presc...

Reducing obesity prejudice in medical education.

BACKGROUND Healthcare worker attitudes toward obese individuals facilitate discrimination and contribute to poor health outcomes. Previous studies have demonstrated medical student bias toward obese individuals, but few have examined effects of the educational environment on these prejudicial beliefs. We sought to determine whether an innovative educational intervention (reading a play about ob...

Reducing the cost of medical education.

Learning from prescribing errors.

The importance of learning from medical error has recently received increasing emphasis. This paper focuses on prescribing errors and argues that, while learning from prescribing errors is a laudable goal, there are currently barriers that can prevent this occurring. Learning from errors can take place on an individual level, at a team level, and across an organisation. Barriers to learning fro...