Aim Medical students have a paediatric placement during their 4th year of medical school. Paediatric pharmacists are involved with teaching sessions to the medical students, including one on prescribing. The overall aim of this audit is to evaluate this teaching on prescribing delivered by the paediatric pharmacist to determine the impact pharmacist has. Specific aims are to: increase the confidence of the medical students in their prescribing; increase their competence in prescribing different medications on a kardex; and determine what extent of prescribing teaching they currently receive. The aim is to collect data for all the students that come for their paediatric placement throughout the academic year (September 2021 – June 2022).

Method Prior to the teaching session the medical students were given a questionnaire to complete with questions including how confident they felt in prescribing, how much training they have previously received in prescribing, and a number of different scenarios with medications to prescribe. They then received a teaching session including a practical session of prescribing on kardexes. Following this session, a questionnaire was completed by the medical students asking again about their confidence in prescribing, the different medications to prescribe again, and overall comments on the session.

Results The questionnaire was initially trialled on the first set of students in September 2021 and following this, changes were made to the questionnaire. The data from this group was therefore excluded from the results and analysis.

Data was analysed from the questionnaires of 33 students. Before the teaching session, 94% of the students were either ‘Not at all confident’ or ‘Slightly confident’ in prescribing for paediatric patients on an inpatient kardex. Following the session this percentage fell to 9% of the students. Instead, 91% of the students stated they were either ‘Somewhat confident’ or ‘Fairly confident’. The questionnaire contained 5 different medications to be prescribed on a kardex template including gentamicin, Clenil®, prednisolone, Epilim® and paracetamol. In the gentamicin scenario, only 3% of students got it completely correct before the teaching session compared to 21% after the teaching. In the Clenil® scenario, 82% of the students were incorrect, compared to after teaching when only 3% were incorrect, with the remainder being partially or completely correct. When prescribing prednisolone, 48% of the students prescribed it incorrectly before the teaching, with none of the students completing all prescribing elements correctly. After the teaching, only 3% were incorrect, with the majority partially correct and 27% completely correct. In the paracetamol prescription, only 3% of students got this totally correct before teaching with 76% of them completing all prescribing elements correctly after the teaching. In the final scenario on Epilim®, 52% of students were incorrect in their prescription compared to only 6% after the teaching.

Conclusion The data shows that the medical students’ confidence in prescribing increased following the teaching session. In each of the prescribing scenarios they completed, the accuracy in these increased in all 5 scenarios. The paracetamol scenario showed the greatest improvement of all the scenarios.