RadPulse: A Free, National, Near-Peer Online Prescribing Safety Assessment Preparation Course for United Kingdom Final-Year Medical Students.

INTRODUCTION

Prescribing errors are a common, costly source of preventable harm in the UK National Health Service, and preparation for the mandatory prescribing safety assessment (PSA) is widely reported to vary between medical schools. RadPulse was a free, national, near-peer online PSA course delivered by junior doctors to UK final-year medical students.

METHODS

Nine live 90-minute sessions were delivered via Microsoft Teams (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA) between October 2024 and January 2025, covering all eight PSA domains through timed exam-style questions, worked clinical reasoning, and live navigation of the British National Formulary and Medicines Complete. Data were collected via a registration form, session feedback forms, and a voluntary postexamination outcomes form. Likert responses were scored 1-5; a Wilson 95% confidence interval (CI) was calculated for the reported pass proportion, and exploratory, uncorrected Spearman correlations examined score-attendance and school-level provision-uptake relationships.

RESULTS

A total of 515 unique students registered from 13 UK medical schools. At registration, mean self-rated PSA preparedness was 2.09/5 (standard deviation (SD), 0.86), and 272/515 (52.8%) rated their medical school's PSA provision 1 or 2 out of 5. Across 1,046 session feedback responses, 98.9% agreed content was appropriately pitched (mean 4.80/5). Self-rated preparedness rose to 3.87/5 (SD, 0.64) by Session 8 among an anonymous, unlinked sample. Of 98 students (19.0% of registrants) who completed the outcomes form, 97 (99.0%; Wilson 95% CI, 94.4-99.8) reported passing the PSA, compared with a national first-attempt benchmark of 91%-97% for cohorts through 2023. Score was not associated with attendance (Spearman rho = 0.07, p = 0.55).

CONCLUSIONS

A free, near-peer, online prescribing course delivered by junior doctors achieved national cross-institutional reach and high learner satisfaction, with a high self-reported pass rate among students who provided an outcome. Self-selection, unlinked data, an unvalidated preparedness measure, and a 19.0% outcomes response rate limit causal interpretation; the pass figure is an optimistic upper bound rather than a population estimate. The approach may offer a low-cost model that other institutions could consider replicating.