'The number of deaths in the US each day from adverse drug reactions is equivalent to three jumbo jets falling out of the sky. The pharmacologist, who is president of the Scottish Medicines Consortium, which makes drugs available on the NHS in Scotland, said: 'There is no doubt that patients are becoming ill and some dying as a result of poor prescribing - and that a substantial proportion of that is undoubtedly avoidable. We have anecdotal evidence of medical students writing to their deans concerned they are not going out in the world as safe prescribers,' he added. 'Nurses probably get more training but it is doctors who do the majority of prescribing. He said it was now possible to 'sail through a medical career without any assessment of how you use drugs'. 'But doctors are getting less and less training in the safe and effective use of medicines.'

Professor David Webb, of Edinburgh University, said: 'We now have extremely powerful drugs and a lot of them are quite complex to use. 'These are the minimum things I would expect a young doctor to know and I couldn't guarantee they would.' How to give it, what sort of dose, how often to give it after a surgical operation and I would expect them also to know how to give it to people who have been on it for some time. 'I would expect him to know how it works, what effects it has on the brain and the spinal cord. He said: 'I would expect a young doctor on the day he qualifies to know about morphine. He was 'not confident' that doctors were leaving medical school knowing how to use the powerful painkiller morphine, for example. They feel very insecure when they go onto the wards for the first time.' 'There is a serious problem about the competence of young doctors in prescribing. Professor Mike Rawlins, chairman of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the body responsible for treatment and 'rationing' guidelines in England, said: 'Five to ten per cent of admissions to hospital are due to adverse drug reactions and the majority of these are avoidable.

Offiical estimates suggest serious reactions to medicines account for one in every 15 admissions to hospital - and errors in prescribing are likely to cause hundreds of deaths a year. Some of Britain's leading doctors issued a stark warning that thousands of lives are being put at risk because doctors are 'sailing through' their careers without learning how to use even basic drugs such as morphine.Ĭlosure of university pharmacology departments and downgrading of the subject in medical training means nurses are now taught more about drugs than doctors, they said. Hundreds of patients are dying needlessly because young doctors are not being properly trained to prescribe medicines, it is claimed.

Doctors in training are dying