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Pharmacist prescribing in critical care: an evaluation of the introduction of pharmacist prescribing in a single large UK teaching hospital

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Gil Ben-Horin
Published: Jul 16, 2017

A retrospective study aimed to describe the current scope and safety of prescribing activity undertaken by critical care pharmacists after the recent introduction of this service in a single large UK teaching hospital. As far as the authors know, this is the first study that has specifically evaluated the practice of prescribing pharmacists in UK critical care units (CCU). All general CCUs used MetaVision for electronic prescribing. The system had been customised and checked by pharmacists and included default doses for most medicines. The authors found that critical care pharmacists undertook significant prescribing activity across a wide range of therapeutic areas and that pharmacist prescribing errors were extremely uncommon. The authors note that “The low error rate in the study may have been positively influenced by the e-prescribing system having default dosing for many drugs.”

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