Educational interventions to improve prescribing competency: a systematic review

Objective: To review the literature on educational interventions to improve prescribing and identify educational methods that improve prescribing competency in both medical and non-medical prescribers.

Design: A systematic review was conducted. The databases Medline, International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA), EMBASE and CINAHL were searched for articles in English published between January 1990 and July 2013.

Setting: Primary and secondary care.

Participants: Medical and non-medical prescribers.

Intervention: Education-based interventions to aid improvement in prescribing competency.

Primary outcome: Improvements in prescribing competency (knows how) or performance (shows how) as defined by Miller's competency model. This was primarily demonstrated through prescribing examinations, changes in prescribing habits or adherence to guidelines.

Results: A total of 47 studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in the systematic review. Studies were categorised by their method of assessment, with 20 studies assessing prescribing competence and 27 assessing prescribing performance. A wide variety of educational interventions were employed, with different outcome measures and methods of assessments. In particular, six studies demonstrated that specific prescribing training using the WHO Guide to Good Prescribing increased prescribing competency in a wide variety of settings. Continuing medical education in the form of academic detailing and personalised prescriber feedback also yielded positive results. Only four studies evaluated educational interventions targeted at non-medical prescribers, highlighting that further research is needed in this area.

Conclusions: A broad range of educational interventions have been conducted to improve prescribing competency. The WHO Guide to Good Prescribing has the largest body of evidence to support its use and is a promising model for the design of targeted prescribing courses. There is a need for further development and evaluation of educational methods for non-medical prescribers.