Keeping up to date and ensuring safe prescribing

As outlined in Good medical practice, you must recognise and work within the limits of your competence, and you must only practise under the level of supervision appropriate to your role, knowledge, skills and training, and the task you’re carrying out.You must keep your knowledge and skills up to date. You must maintain and develop your knowledge and skills that are relevant to your role and practice in:

1. pharmacology and therapeutics
2. prescribing and managing medicines
3. any technology or processes you use to prescribe, for example via remote consultation.

You should make use of electronic and other systems that can improve the safety of your prescribing activity, for example by highlighting interactions and allergies and by ensuring consistency and compatibility of medicines prescribed, supplied and administered.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s (MHRA) Drug Safety Update and Central Alerting System provide information and advice to support the safer use of medicines relevant to your practice and alert you to safety information about medicines you prescribe.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s (MHRA) Drug Safety Update and Central Alerting System provide information and advice to support the safer use of medicines relevant to your practice and alert you to safety information about medicines you prescribe.

If you are unsure about interactions or other aspects of prescribing and managing medicines, you should seek advice from your supervisor and/ or other experienced colleagues, including pharmacists, prescribing advisers and clinical pharmacologists.

You must be familiar with the guidance in the British National Formulary (BNF) and British National Formulary for Children (BNFC), which contain essential information to help you prescribe, monitor, supply, and administer medicines.

You should follow the advice in the BNF on prescription writing and make sure your prescriptions and orders are clear, in accordance with the relevant statutory requirements. You should also make sure you include your name legibly.⁴ As well, you should consider including clinical indications⁵on your prescriptions.

You should take account of the clinical guidelines published by:

1. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (England)
2. Department for Health, Social Services and Public Safety (Northern Ireland)
3. Healthcare Improvement Scotland (including the Scottish Medicines Consortium and Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network) (Scotland)
4. All-Wales Medicines Strategy Group (Wales)
5. medical royal colleges and other authoritative sources of specialty specific clinical guidelines.

You should be careful about using medical devices for purposes for which they were not intended.

You should make sure that anyone you delegate responsibility for dispensing or administering medicines to is competent to do what you ask.⁶ Advice on training for dispensing support staff can be obtained from the General Pharmaceutical Council and Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

Where relevant, if you don’t wish to prescribe, be involved in making proposals for prescribing, or provide medicines or treatments due to a conscientious objection, you should follow our explanatory guidance on ‘Personal beliefs and medical practice’.

You should not collude in the unlawful advertising of prescription-only or unlicensed medicines to the public by prescribing via websites that breach advertising regulations.⁷