It’s World Patient Safety Day on 17th September, and this year’s theme, set by the World Health Organization, is safe care for long term conditions, under the slogan “Safe care for life”. Conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and chronic respiratory illness account for around 74% of deaths worldwide, and people living with them interact with health systems more often, and over a much longer period than most other patients. This means more prescriptions, more medicine reviews and more opportunities for something to be missed.
A large part of keeping patients safe over years of treatment comes down to what happens after a prescription: monitoring, recognising when something has gone wrong and reporting it so the wider system can learn. In the UK, that reporting happens through the MHRA’s Yellow Card Scheme, and in partnership with the MHRA we’ve developed the Yellow Card Scheme Assessment to support and educate prescribing trainees and students.
MHRA Yellow Card Scheme Assessment
The MHRA Yellow Card Scheme Assessment is a free resource designed to educate learners on adverse drug reaction reporting. Split into two sections, the first covers the role of the MHRA and how the Yellow Card Scheme works, and the second moves into applied, scenario-based questions on recognising and reporting adverse incidents. Rather than simply presenting information, it asks learners to work through realistic cases, to make the reporting habit stick.
The module is now CPD accredited by the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine, valid until July 2028 and completing both modules is worth 1 CPD point.
A resource you can recommend to your students
The Yellow Card module can be completed directly through a learners own login on the BPS Assessment portal, alongside their PSA preparation or other prescribing revision. It’s a good one to have in mind around World Patient Safety Day, whether that’s a mention in a lecture on medication safety or a link shared.
If you’re also looking to build your own tailored assessments and eLearning, our Platform Licensing runs on the same cloud based platform, giving educators access to our intuitive interface to write, edit and administer content, delivering it straight to your candidates to enhance their prescribing knowledge and skills with real time analytics to track how learners are getting on.
If you’d like to talk through how Platform Licensing could fit into your programme, get in touch with the BPS Assessment team.