Fiona MacRae writes in Mailonline-Health, “Young doctors are putting patients’ lives at risk because they are not being trained to prescribe medicines,” accoding to Dr. David Webb, a pharmacologist.

The General Medical Council’s study of junior doctors trained at three different medical schools found some struggled with the simple arithmetic needed to calculate drug doses. Just one in six of the Warwick University-trained medics passed an eight-question test on prescribing. The report concluded: ‘There was a consistent thread of under-preparedness for prescribing.

However, in response to this, and feedback from medical students themselves, the Department has funded the development of new online training packages on prescribing, to complement existing training.