The beginning of Appendix 1 in the paper BNF contains several tables of ‘drugs that cause…’. This saves you from looking up each drug individually when being asked which drug is most likely to cause ‘x’. The Geeky Medics P rescribing Safety Assessment (PSA) Question Bank has been crafted to accurately reflect the style and format of the actual PSA, with all of our questions adhering to official PSA guidelines. You will be asked to choose an appropriate drug or intravenous fluid with its corresponding dose, route, and frequency.

For example: ‘What would you prescribed to treat acute pulmonary oedema secondary to left ventricular systolic dysfunction?’ Mnemonics can be super helpful. There are a few things like enzyme inducers and inhibitors that you will need to rote learn and mnemonics can help with that. This section will task you with selecting the most suitable plan of monitoring for either beneficial or harmful effects of a newly started medication. Often relevant adverse drug reactions (ADRs) can be found in either the “side effect”, “interactions” or “cautions” section of the medication. Don’t lose easy marks! As prescribing counts for a whopping great 40% of the marks don’t lose out on the ample marks available for your signature and the date!Know your metrics! milligrams and millilitres, micrograms and nanograms. Know the difference and how to convert between them. The PSA is a very time-sensitive assessment and therefore time management is important. A guide of how long you should spend on each section (based on weightage) is as detailed below: PSA questions are predominantly based on information that can be found within the BNF. This includes: drug dose, drug route, drug frequency, side effects, adjustments in renal impairment, monitoring requirements and so on. It has a wealth of information beyond simply drug dosing, including interactions and treatment summaries. For Pass Application by post, applicants are required to come personally to PSA Pass Centre on the date of pass collection to have your fingerprint/Photo enrol onto the PSA Pass. You don’t need to know everything, you just need to know how to find it. This is key! There are things you need to know – but you can be smart about learning what can’t be found on the BNF as long as you know how to locate the information you are looking for. For example what to do with a high INR can be found in the BNF.

Newly qualified FY1 doctors will write and review many prescriptions each day, however, prescribing is often considered one of the most challenging areas. In addition, prescription errors are commonly observed in practice. Therefore, the PSA was introduced to ensure junior doctors are safe prescribers with the aim to improve clinical practice and reduce the number of prescribing errors. Utilise the “Interaction” section for the medication on the BNF. This will give a list of all interactions with the particular medication you are interested in. Again, use the ‘Ctrl F’ function to speed up your search.

PDF EPUB Download

Know how to prescribe gentamicin and how to use the gentamicin chart to determine next prescription timing The treatment summaries can help in this section if you are not sure what drug should be used. However, having a good basic understanding of most conditions allows you to focus on looking up the appropriate drug based on your prior understanding which helps save time. Typically, the prescription review section involves reviewing 6-10 medications and identifying which medications should be stopped or could be a cause of a clinical problem such as impaired renal function. There will be 2 fluid prescribing questions – learn how much fluid a patient is likely to need for resuscitation, rehydration and maintenance, and which fluids to use.