Striking fear into students' hearts: Unforeseen consequences of prescribing education.

PURPOSE: Undergraduate medical education (UGME) has to prepare students to do safety-critical work (notably, to prescribe) immediately after qualifying. Despite hospitals depending on them, medical graduates consistently report feeling unprepared to prescribe and they sometimes harm patients. Research clarifying how to prepare students better could improve healthcare safety. Our aim was to explore how students experienced preparing for one of their commonest prescribing tasks: intravenous fluid therapy (IVFT). METHODS: Complexity assumptions guided the research, which used a qualitative methodology oriented towards hermeneutic phenomenology. The study design was an uncontrolled and unplanned complex intervention: judicial review of the iatrogenic death of five children due to hyponatraemia in our region had resulted in the recommendation that students' education in 'the implementation of important clinical guidelines' relevant to fluid and electrolyte balance should be intensified. An opportunity sample of 40 final-year medical students drew and gave audio-recorded commentaries on rich pictures. We completed two template analyses: one of participants' transcribed commentaries on the pictures and one using a novel heuristic to analyse the pictures themselves. We then reconciled the two analyses into a single template. RESULTS: There were four themes: affects, teaching and learning, contradictions, and the curriculum as a journey. To explore interconnections between themes, we chose the picture best exemplifying each of the four themes and interpreted the curriculum journey depicted in each of them. These interpretations were grounded in each participant's picture, verbal account of the picture, and the aggregate findings of the template analysis. Participants' experiences were influenced by the situated complexity of IVFT. Layered on top of that, contradictions, overlaps, and gaps within the curriculum introduced extraneous complexity. Confusion and apprehension resulted. CONCLUSIONS: After spending five years preparing to prescribe IVFT, participants felt unprepared to do so. We conclude that intensive teaching had not achieved its avowed goal of improving students' preparedness for safe practice. Merton's seminal work on the 'unanticipated consequences of purposive social action' suggests that intensive teaching may even have contributed to their unpreparedness.

Native kidney BK virus nephropathy associated with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.

BK virus nephropathy (BKVN) is a well-recognized complication of renal transplantation. Several cases of native kidney BKVN following other solid organ or bone marrow transplants have been reported. We describe a patient with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia who presented with deteriorating renal function with no history of solid organ or bone marrow transplantation. Renal biopsy demonstrated tubular injury characteristic of viral infection, confirmed as BK virus by immunohistochemistry and elevated serum BK viral titres. Treatment with leflunomide reduced serum viral titres and stabilized renal function. This is the first biopsy-proven case of native kidney BKVN in a patient with no previous transplantation history.

Readiness to prescribe: Using educational design to untie the Gordian Knot.

INTRODUCTION: Junior residents routinely prescribe medications for hospitalised patients with only arms-length supervision, which compromises patient safety. A cardinal example is insulin prescribing, which is commonplace, routinely delegated to very junior doctors, difficult, potentially very dangerous, and getting no better. Our aim was to operationalise the concept of 'readiness to prescribe' by validating an instrument to quality-improve residents' workplace prescribing education. METHODS: Guided by theories of behaviour change, implementation, and error, and by empirical evidence, we developed and refined a mixed-methods 24-item evaluation instrument, and analysed numerical responses from Foundation Trainees (junior residents) in Northern Ireland, UK using principal axis factoring, and conducted a framework analysis of participants' free-text responses. RESULTS: 255 trainees participated, 54% women and 46% men, 80% of whom were in the second foundation year. The analysis converged on a 4-factor solution explaining 57% of the variance. Participants rated their capability to prescribe higher (79%) than their capability to learn to prescribe (69%; p<0.001) and rated the support to their prescribing education lower still (43%; p<0.001). The findings were similar in men and women, first and second year trainees, and in different hospitals. Free text responses described an unreflective type of learning from experience in which participants tended to 'get by' when faced with complex problems. DISCUSSION: Operationalising readiness to prescribe as a duality, comprising residents' capability and the fitness of their educational environments, demonstrated room for improvement in both. We offer the instrument to help clinical educators improve the two in tandem.

Learning to prescribe intravenous fluids: A scoping review.

INTRODUCTION: Prescribing intravenous (IV) fluid therapy is a core skill expected of qualified doctors at the point of graduation, but medical graduates often feel ill-equipped to perform this task. This lack of preparedness contributes to treatment-related patient harm. This scoping review maps the current state of published evidence about how junior doctors prescribe IV fluid therapy and learn how to do it. METHODS: We searched five electronic databases and grey literature from 1994 until June 2016 for articles describing any aspect of IV fluid prescribing practice or its education. A total of 63 articles were selected for analysis. Using the WHO Guide to Good Prescribing to categorize the extracted findings, our review focuses on prescribing IV fluids in adult generalist settings. RESULTS: Most articles studied IV fluid prescribing from the perspective of the doctor. Junior clinicians struggled to conceptualize IV fluid prescribing as a 'whole task' in authentic work settings and lacked support. Educational interventions to improve IV fluid prescribing often focused on enhancing prescriber knowledge about fluid and electrolyte balance rather than execution of the prescribing task. CONCLUSIONS: Our understanding of IV fluid prescribing as a holistic integrated skill is patchy, as is its performance. Current IV fluid prescribing education appears insufficient to foster safe and effective practice. For education to achieve the ultimate goal of safer prescribing in workplaces, we need a clearer understanding of how healthcare professionals prescribe IV fluids in real world practice.