European Open Platform for Prescribing Education

The European Open Platform for Prescribing Education is aimed at improving and harmonizing CPT education in Europe and the rest of the world. Previous research has shown that medical students on the verge of graduating – throughout Europe – feel insufficiently secure to prescribe medicines. They make too many errors. Moreover, the quality and quantity of CPT education varies highly between the medical schools in Europe. In 2018 the EACPT Education Working group has set the goal to improve and harmonize education.

Prescribing is a cognitive skill that cannot be learned from books or lectures. It needs to be actively trained using authentic patient cases. In the 1990’s the WHO Guide to Good Prescribing & Teachers’ Guide to Good Prescribing have revolutionized CPT education by introducing the six-step model for problem based learning in pharmacotherapy. While this model was successfully implemented in many medical schools around the world, others struggle to implement it and continue to use traditional teaching methods.

Now, in 2021, internet technology has completely changed the way we teach. E-learnings, online videos, simulators and even serious games have become key resources in pharmacotherapy education. Such resources are usually very expensive to produce and advances in technology may render them useless sooner than you hope for. It is hard to keep up! Yet, for no apparent reason, publicly funded universities tend to put a lot of time and budget in creating very innovative resources for their own students only.

We believe that sharing and collaborating is essential to keep up and improve and harmonize CPT education. Therefore the aim of EurOP2E is to facilitate collaboration and sharing of resources and to assist CPT educators in improving their teaching.