The Dutch list of essential drugs for undergraduate medical education

Essential drug lists are used in several countries to ensure safe prescribing and to meet the needs of the national health care system. For medical education purposes, existing lists are in practice too extensive or outdated. There is as yet no broad-based consensus list of commonly prescribed drugs that junior doctors should be able to prescribe safely and effectively without direct supervision. Prescribing errors among junior doctors are common in clinical practice because many lack prescribing competence after graduation. This is in part due to inadequate education in clinical pharmacology and therapeutics (CP&T) in the undergraduate medical curriculum. To support CP&T education, it is important to determine which drugs medical undergraduates should be able to prescribe safely and effectively without direct supervision by the time they graduate. Currently, there is no such list with broad-based consensus. Therefore, the aim was to reach consensus on a list of essential drugs for undergraduate medical education in the Netherlands. This study shows that the Delphi method is feasible to reach consensus within a country about a list of essential drugs for medical education. A list of essential drugs will harmonize and support the teaching and assessment of clinical pharmacology and therapeutics in undergraduate medical curricula. This is the first study to identify drugs that Dutch junior doctors should be able to prescribe safely and effectively without direct supervision.