Prescribing Competence of Canadian Medical Graduates: National Survey of Medical School Leaders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Suboptimal knowledge of clinical pharmacology, therapeutics, and toxicology (CPT) and poor-quality prescribing are threats to patient safety. Our previous national survey of medical faculty identified limited confidence in medical student graduates’ ability to safely prescribe, as well as an interest in a national prescribing competence assessment. Given the in-person challenges posed by the restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, we aimed to re-evaluate opinions and gauge the interest in e-learning resources and assessments. Using public sources, a sampling frame of medical school leaders from all 17 Canadian medical schools, including deans, vice-deans, and program directors for clerkship, residency, and e-learning, were invited to participate in a cross-sectional survey. Survey questions were finalized after several rounds of testing, and analyses were descriptive. Of 1448 invitations, 411 (28.4%) individuals reviewed the survey, and, among them, 278 (67.6%) completed at least one survey question, with representation from all schools. While more than 90% of respondents agreed that medical students should meet a minimum standard of prescribing competence, only 17 (7.9%) could vouch for their school meeting objectives in CPT, and many had significant concerns about their own or other schools’ recent graduate prescribing abilities. Given the lack of local CPT e-curricula resources, there was strong interest in a national online course and assessment in CPT. Our national survey results suggest an ongoing inadequacy of medical trainees’ prescribing competence, and also provide a strong endorsement for both a national online CPT course and assessment during medical school.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.116 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 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".