The prescribing safety assessment: Looking to the future

[...]it was highlighted that while PSA practice was seen as a positive activity, there was concern that too much focus on specific question performance may detract from teaching the ‘skill’ of prescribing to merely learning to pass an assessment. real tension between learning how to pass an exam and how to be good at something Attendees who worked within universities expressed the view that the opportunity to use the PSA platform for teaching purposes would be valuable and that their students had a desire to practice prescribing on the platform ahead of their PSA. [...]there was the sense that the PSA should be promoting clinical reasoning skills, rather than encouraging reliance on looking all the answers up. Quantifying the impact that the PSA has had on improving prescribing competency is complex: research in this field requires the ability to design a study that eliminates confounders such as e-prescribing, addresses the significant limitations of error reporting, and has sufficient data to demonstrate statistical significance. Suggestions from authors to address this included analyzing pre- and post-assessment prescribing of cohorts of students, or utilizing qualitative measures such as student confidence.