The GMC invited views on new draft guidance for doctors on 'Good practice in prescribing and managing medicines and devices'. The revised guidance sets out doctors responsibilities in relation to:
- keeping up to date and prescribing safely
- need and objectivity – prescribing for yourself and those close to you
- consent to prescribe – explaining benefits, risks and side effects of medicines; improving adherence
- sharing information with and prescribing at the recommendation of colleagues
- repeat prescribing, prescribing with repeats and reviewing medicines
- prescribing online, by telephone and video-link
- prescribing off-label and unlicensed medicines, including for reasons of cost-effectiveness
- conflicts of interest – prescribing incentives and financial interests in pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies and dispensing practices
- sports medicine – prescribing performance enhancing drugs
This updates Good practice in prescribing medicines (2008) and provides guidance on the medicines-related topics most frequently raised by doctors contacting the GMC for advice as well as issues featured in fitness to practice investigations.
COMMENTS ON GENERAL MEDICAL COUNCIL
GOOD PRACTICE IN PRESCRIBING AND MANAGING MEDICINES AND DEVICES
The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (RCPE) welcomes the opportunity to provide additional comments on the updated Good practice in prescribing and managing medicines and devices guidance.
The updated document is again comprehensive and detailed, and has incorporated many of the College’s previous comments on the 2010 consultation.
However, two points highlighted in the College’s response in October 2010 have not been addressed in the updated draft guidance and might be worthy of inclusion in the final document:
Prescribing by provisionally registered doctors – while the updated draft guidance states that “the guidance applies to all doctors on the medical registers regardless of specialty, grade and whether they work in the private or public sector”, it does not specifically address the issue of provisionally registered doctors, and as many of the well publicised difficulties in prescribing have related to doctors with provisional registration, it could be argued that this justifies explicit reference. The guidance could therefore be more specific on the supervisory arrangements for provisionally registered doctors.
Other prescribers - the GMC makes it clear that this guidance applies to doctors but, as other groups are now able to prescribe quite widely, there is a case for this to be acknowledged in the GMC guidance for doctors to ensure that any supervising responsibilities for nurse or AHP prescribers is given due attention. As stated in the previous consultation response from the RCPE in October 2010, the GMC may wish to explore the regulatory advice given to other prescribing professionals and cross reference within the updated GMC guidance for doctors.