About the Book:

Developing Your Prescribing Skills is intended to help practitioners and all new prescribers assess their current skills, and recognise their skills gaps, identify ways of meeting their learning needs and be accountable for their prescribing, both as individuals and teams. Set in the context of 'real life' case scenarios, it takes a practical view of the main issues facing prescribers in all walks of practice. This book encourages the reader to apply the generic prescribing skills covered in each chapter to their own practice through the use of reflective exercises with feedback from experienced prescribers, suggested areas for further study, mind maps and top tips.

Chapters offer information and advice on the following:

·         taking a good history

·         prioritising in polypharmacy

·         consultations and prescribing in paediatrics

·         monitoring prescribing

·         ethical decision making in prescribing

·         establishing partnerships with patients

·         influences on prescribing.

Developing Your Prescribing Skills will be an invaluable resource for all new prescribers including junior doctors and GPs, and non-medical prescribers such as pharmacists, nurses and allied health professionals.

Contents:

1.    Introduction to prescribing and this Book

2.    Being accountable for your prescribing

3.    Taking a good history

4.    Consultations involving children

5.    Prioritising in polypharmacy

6.    Practical prescribing in paediatrics

7.    Monitoring prescribing

8.    Ethical decision making in prescribing

9.    Prescribing as Part of a team

10. Establishing partnerships with patients

11. Influences on prescribing

12. Conclusion

About the Editor:

Trudy Thomas MSc, BSc, MRPharmS qualified as a pharmacist in 1988. For the next 14 years, she combined community pharmacy work with training and teaching and being a mum. She worked initially for the Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education and the National Pharmaceutical Association, as well as a number of Kent-based Primary Care Organisations, as a prescribing adviser. She joined the Medway School of Pharmacy in 2004 as a clinical lecturer and is now joint Head of Clinical and professional Practice and Director of Taught Postgraduate Studies. She has been the pharmacist programme lead for the School's Postgraduate Certificate in Independent and Supplementary Prescribing for 6 years.

Trudy's research interests are mainly to do prescribing and physical activity. In 2008 she started a part-time PhD investigating whether community pharmacists can use behaviour change counseling to increase the amount of physical activity undertaken by people with mild to moderate depression.