News in brief - March 21, 2011

AMA urges patients to double-check medications

The American Medical Association in March made a free medication safety checklist available to help patients avoid contraindications and comply with their physicians' orders.

The checklist asks patients to list all the medications, vitamins and other supplements they are taking and talk with their doctors about them. The form advises patients to stop taking any medications without their physicians' approval and ask questions about medications they do not understand.

"The medication safety checklist fosters a partnership between patients and their physicians focused on eliminating medication errors," said AMA Board of Trustees member Edward L. Langston, MD. "By talking to their physicians about all medications and supplements, whether or not they are prescribed, patients take an active role in health care safety."

The checklist is available online (www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/433/medication-safety-checklist.pdf).

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Most medical schools give short shrift to health policy

Despite the ways in which health system reform will affect their careers, medical students receive only 14 hours of health policy education over four years, according to a survey of 93 medical school deans published in the March 10 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21345091).

About a quarter of schools have courses dedicated to health care policy, but most cover the topic as part of classes that are broader in scope. Only 30% of deans report having a health policy department, though more than half said that plans are under way to establish such departments or institutes. The study's authors, students at Harvard Medical School in Boston, took a mandatory, 40-hour course on health policy. They write that "health policy literacy should no longer be considered an ancillary skill, but rather a core competency of a 21st-century physician."

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