Is it time for a nontechnical skills approach to prescribing?

The quality of prescribing continues to cause concern. How to reduce errors is the subject of ongoing debate, following recent studies showing that prescribing errors in hospitals occur in about 7% of prescriptions and a third of patients (EQUIP [1] and PROTECT [2]). Similar error rates have also been seen in the community setting (PRACTICE [3]). In prescribing, junior doctors have been the main target of educational initiatives to improve safety. They are heavily involved in hospital prescribing, writing the majority of prescription items. Their error rates are higher than error rates of more senior doctors (in EQUIP, Foundation year one doctors had an error rate of 8.4%, Foundation year two doctors 10.3% and consultants 5.9% [1]; in PROTECT figures were 7.4, 8.6 and 6.3%, respectively [2]), although the overall number of items written by senior staff is far lower. There are initiatives which aim to improve new prescribers' knowledge (for example, the Prescribe e-learning project [4]) and to assure a basic level of competency (the Prescribing Skills Assessment [5]) for new graduates. The question of how best to teach and assess prescribing in UK medical schools is high on the agenda, with both the General Medical Council and the Medical Schools Council actively supporting these efforts. Increasing knowledge alone is insufficient to change behaviour, and the transfer of knowledge into clinical practice is critical. Moves to improve familiarization with the workplace for medical students, such as student assistantships and shadowing, may help with this transfer, but there is a limit to what can be done in the undergraduate environment. New doctors will still be prescribing for the first time, although initiatives such as ‘preprescribing’ (a system where senior medical students prescribe under supervision) may make this transition easier [6]. However, while foundation doctors may be a legitimate target group, an exclusive focus on juniors may unhelpfully impute blame and miss wider options for intervention. Meanwhile, current efforts at the system level are focused on electronic prescribing, which has been shown to reduce prescribing errors but will not eradicate them and can produce new types of errors [7]. Likewise, cogent arguments have been made for common drug charts across different hospitals, which may improve the situation but will not be sufficient alone [1,8]. Further efforts to decrease error rates in prescribing are needed. Taking a human factors approach to the management of prescribing errors may be valuable. The science of human factors seeks to improve system design to support human performance and addresses the interaction between the work environment, organizational systems and people working in them [9]. The most recognized model of accident causation in healthcare is Reason's ‘Swiss cheese model’, which describes latent conditions as ‘pathogens’ in the organization, as well as the individual's unsafe actions, contributing to human error. It also recognizes the role of humans as defences in the system [10]. The clinical human factors group is one organization that seeks to apply human factors science in medicine [11]. An element of human factor science that is beginning to be implemented in medicine focuses on the nontechnical skills (NTS) of clinical staff, also known as crew resource management (CRM) skills, which are recognized to be critical in error reduction across a range of industries [12]. This approach seeks to identify behaviours that mitigate or prevent error and to train staff accordingly [9], recognizing that staff are often the last defence or instigator of the active failure in the Swiss cheese model [10]. In medicine, NTS have been described as behaviours in the healthcare setting that are not directly related to the use of medical expertise, drugs or equipment [13]. They encompass both the social skills of communication, team working and leadership and the cognitive skills of situation awareness and decision making. These have also been shown to be important for pharmacists, especially when dealing with aggressive patients [14]. Identifying the nontechnical skills in prescribing provides a new avenue for interventions to reduce errors. Indeed, particular areas highlighted by recent research into prescribing errors [1,2] include the following: coping with high workload and a lack of time; poor communication (both verbal and written); suboptimal teamwork; impaired physical and mental wellbeing; and a lack of appropriate supervision. These can be mapped to particular nontechnical skills and point to the importance of NTS performance of all staff in causation and prevention of prescribing errors. One good example of where nontechnical skills in prescribing have been recently highlighted is communication around prescribing instructions. Many of the prescriptions written by junior doctors are under the instruction of senior doctors, pharmacists and nurses [1,2,15]. In one study, as many as 61% of prescriptions written by junior doctors were under the instruction of a more senior doctor [16]. Although a high level of variability was seen in practices between wards and specialities, in most situations the instruction was very general (e.g. drug class or drug name), leaving junior doctors to figure out the details of the prescription. Such nonspecific communication without confirmation of understanding is vulnerable to error [9]. Interview data [1,2,15] and recent work on difficult prescribing decisions [17] suggest that junior doctors may lack time to look up the necessary information and, perhaps more importantly, are embarrassed to check (either with the British National Formulary or seniors) on a ward round, because they feel they are expected to know what to do. As well as targeting junior prescribers, could we train registrars and consultants to be more specific about prescribing instructions or routinely to explore with junior doctors their understanding of what is expected for a given patient with respect to starting a new medication (i.e. route of administration, dose and frequency)? Could we train junior doctors to ask more questions when they perceive the information is insufficient? Behavioural marker systems have been produced for several medical disciplines, and these are used in the training of doctors in these essential skills [11,17–19]. This approach is highly attractive as a framework in medical training with a specific focus on prescribing to build up an individual's nontechnical skills, in addition to his or her knowledge and clinical skills. We believe that a nontechnical skills approach can provide an additional valuable framework for training as well as for the design of further studies and interventions around prescribing errors. Moreover, as one element of an overall human factors approach, development of a behavioural marker system of the key nontechnical skills in prescribing could positively supplement educational efforts and changes in systems to mitigate and prevent error. This approach will aid us to design more effective interventions and to ensure that efforts to improve prescribing are part of an ongoing programme of evidence-based work, rather than one-off reactive ventures.