Abstract

Last month over 50 GPs met at a one-day conference organised by the Royal College of General Practitioners in association with the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin. Ten of them described how they had examined various aspects of their own prescribing and what they had learnt from doing so. The intention was to illustrate the view that ‘critical consideration of one’s own prescribing habits can help to improve them, and need not be painful or difficult’.¹ As Michael Linnett, chairman of the Council of the RCGP, put it in his opening remarks, we should try to avoid both unselective overprescribing and therapeutic nihilism. Each of the speakers had looked at his own and in some cases at his colleagues’ prescribing from a particular point of view.