Prescribing Guidance and Standards for Healthcare Professionals for Health Practitioners facing a Council or Board investigation, complaint or allegation

The prescription reconstructed: the authority and competence to prescribe it, the indication and the alternatives, what the patient was told, the monitoring and review arranged, and what the record shows; the step missed, named by you from your authority’s own prescribing standard; the contributing factors described as conditions rather than reasons; the effect on the patient in their terms; and what has changed — the check, the protocol, the audit, the supervision — with dates. The course’s ninth section covers each part.

A prescribing audit repeated with the figures shown; a check built into the prescribing system; a controlled-drug or high-risk medicine protocol the practice follows; supervision of prescribing with reports; CPD on the medicine or the area concerned; and, for informal prescribing, the professional alternatives now used and a period without recurrence. Each is concrete. No provider is accredited by any Council or Board, and no course decides a matter. What every authority, a Committee and the Tribunal weigh is dated, targeted remediation with reflection that engages your own code — and this course is written to the ground every authority’s standard shares on this subject, so the connection to yours is plain. Check the wording of any direction with your indemnity insurer, union, professional association or lawyer before you rely on it.

Yes — before anything goes to your Council or Board, Medsafe, your employer, a funder, a Professional Conduct Committee or the Tribunal. Your indemnity insurer, your union or professional association, or a lawyer will read a response before it is sent, and will advise where more than one agency is involved. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and no course determines the outcome of a matter.

Seriously, and remediably. Every prescribing authority’s standard addresses prescribing for yourself and those close to you, the emergency exception is narrow, and a controlled drug makes it graver. What the authorities read for is whether you can name the loss of objectivity and the assessment that did not happen, and whether it has stopped — with the professional alternatives now used. The course’s fifth section is written for exactly this.

It is a near miss, and the authorities regard a near miss reported and learned from as evidence of a safe prescriber. What reaches them is a pattern, a harm, or an employer’s notification. The course’s seventh section covers near misses and responding at once, and a near miss followed by a check now built in is the simplest remediation there is.

An audit query is the beginning. It is answered by the reconciliation of prescriptions against records and indications, the review of the patients concerned, and a plan for monitoring and deprescribing where it is due — and a query answered that way can close with the funder. The course covers the difference between complaints, audits and investigations, the audit triggers, and how investigators assess prescribing practice.

It can be both, and the medicines legislation runs alongside. Prescribing outside your scope or authority is a ground for discipline in its own right and may engage Medsafe; prescribing within authority but beyond competence is a competence concern. Either way the authorities read for whether you recognised the edge of your authority and what you did — and the course’s second section covers scope, authority, and prescribing in new or transitional roles.

Three: your Council or Board under the Act; Medsafe and, for controlled drugs, the Police under the Medicines Act and the Misuse of Drugs Act; and ACC where a patient was harmed by treatment. They can run at once, they read each other’s findings, and the course covers how they interact and what each reads for.

A sample of your prescriptions reviewed against your authority’s standard or the relevant guideline: indication documented, alternatives considered, the conversation recorded, monitoring arranged, review dates set, repeats reviewed — with a baseline, a repeat after an interval, the figures shown and a second signature. It is the remediation the authorities read for in a prescribing matter, and the course’s sixth and eighth sections cover it.

This course is the prescription: authority, indication, the conversation, monitoring and the record, with high-risk medicines and informal prescribing in depth. Documentation is the record as a whole. Ensuring Clinical Competence and Patient Safety is competence as a whole, of which prescribing is one part. A prescriber whose concern is a prescription starts here.

Every authority whose practitioners prescribe — the Medical Council, the Nursing Council, the Pharmacy Council, the Dental Council, the Midwifery Council, the ODOB and others — and the medicines legislation and ACC apply to every prescriber. The course reads each authority’s prescribing standard in its own words and the rest alongside.

The course is 2 CPD hours, self-paced, with twelve months’ access from purchase. The certificate is issued on completion, dated, with the course title and the CPD hours, for a response, a portfolio, a competence programme or your recertification.