Paediatric psychotropic prescribing practices in Ireland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: This study describes the attitudes, knowledge and prescribing of psychotropic medication in children. METHOD: A study-specific questionnaire was mailed to all child psychiatrists, paediatricians and a group of registered general practitioners (GPs) from a selected Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services catchment area. RESULTS: In the 116 respondents who replied (39% response rate), psychotropic medication was generally valued and used by all groups (70.1%). Respondents believed that the majority (61.9%) of their non-medical colleagues would also value/support the use of medication and this endorsement influenced the respondents' prescribing rates. Initiating medication was viewed as the province of child psychiatry (78.6%). Medication is felt to be justified in a wide variety of mental health disorders, their use being reserved for severe presentations, with psychostimulants and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors being most used. A significant number of GPs (60.9%) and paediatricians (63.4%) were felt to be lacking in competence in psychotropic prescribing, with a general request for more seminars in this area (61.5%) with almost half (45%) of them believing that they would prescribe more often. CONCLUSION: The use of psychotropic medication in children remains a valued and common practice in Ireland. Attitudinal and practice differences across professional groups exist, and although the experience is one of relative safety there was a strong desire for further education leading to a perceived increase in utilisation. The impact of perceived public opinion regarding psychotropic prescribing along with a lack of competence may represent a major barrier to effective prescribing, thus highlighting the importance of ongoing professional development and increased public health initiatives to increase knowledge and understanding in this increasingly important area.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".