The 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 2023, 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.

10
Consortium partners
8
Peer-reviewed publications
10
Collaborative resources in production
50
Best practice resources ready to be opened up

The framework

Based on a large international survey study and consensus meeting among CPT teachers that visited the 2019 EACPT conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

As shown in the figure below. The framework will have strong fundament of existing models in pharmacotherapy education, such as the WHO guide to good prescribing and the large Network of Teachers in Pharmacotherapy education. The pillars represent essential aspects that resulted from the consensus meeting at the 2019 EACPT conference in Stockholm, Sweden we have created a framework for the online platform.

  • Red pillars are aimed at making the platform and its resources as widely usable as possible. Resources will be primarily in
  • English, but made easily adaptable and licensed using Creative Commons licenses that allow adaptation and redistribution.
  • Green pillars are aimed at securing the quality of platform and its resources. All resources will be reviewed both before publication with a peer-review system and afterwards using user reviews. The platform will be “teacher
    first”, so that teachers can decide whether it is good enough.
  • Purple pillars are aimed at optimizing the user experience of the platform, the platform will be easily searchable and dedicated to high quality materials.
  • The blue pillar is aimed at making the platform freely available to teachers all over the world
Image CC by 4.0 – Bakkum, M.J., Richir, M.C., Papaioannidou, P. et al. EurOP2E – the European Open Platform for Prescribing Education, a consensus study among clinical pharmacology and therapeutics teachers. Eur J Clin Pharmacol 77, 1209–1218 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00228-021-03101-4

Coming milestones

Platform online

The platform will be officially launched during the EACPT Education Days 2023.

Associate partners

The EurOP2E project is a European funded KA2 Strategic Partnership project with Agreement Number: 2020-1-NL01-KA203-083098