Medication-List Reconciliation
Read a prescription chart or referral medication list systematically before judging individual entries.
How to prepare for the PSA
Combine patient-centred prescribing judgement with fast BNF navigation, reliable calculations, complete prescriptions and explicit monitoring and communication.
Core concepts
Concept 1
Official review items present a list of six to ten current medicines and ask two distinct tasks about that same list.
Exam cue: Read the two requested review tasks before inspecting each prescription.
Concept 2
A reliable first pass checks medicine identity, indication, dose, formulation, route, frequency, timing and duplication.
Exam cue: Build a patient problem list and match each medicine to its likely purpose.
Concept 3
The medication list must be reconciled with the patient's symptoms, diagnoses, allergies, organ function and recent clinical change.
Exam cue: Use a consistent medicine-by-medicine sweep so an obvious first issue does not hide a second one.
Risk pitfalls and guardrails
Reviewing isolated medicines without relating them to the patient.
Guardrail: Do not let a familiar medicine, reference search or calculator output replace patient-specific safety checks and escalation.
Stopping after finding one concern when the task requests more than one prescription.
Guardrail: Do not let a familiar medicine, reference search or calculator output replace patient-specific safety checks and escalation.
Using the same issue to answer two linked review tasks that ask about different problems.
Guardrail: Do not let a familiar medicine, reference search or calculator output replace patient-specific safety checks and escalation.
Memory anchors
Review List Size
A PSA Prescription Review item normally presents six to ten medicines.
Two Tasks
Each official review item contains two distinct linked questions.
Purpose Match
Match each medicine to an indication before deciding whether it belongs.
Entry Sweep
Check drug, form, dose, route, frequency, timing and duplication for every entry.
Patient Match
Reconcile the list with allergies, symptoms, diagnoses and organ function.
Checkpoint rule
Do the check-up only after you can summarize each concept in one sentence and identify one dangerous pitfall from memory.
Knowledge Check (after reading)
Short check-up to confirm understanding of this module.
Check-up Questions
A patient is admitted with “insulin 20” on a handwritten list, but no product, units, timing or device. What should happen?
An admission list says “methotrexate 10 mg daily,” while the patient says it is for rheumatoid arthritis. What is the safest response?
Answer all questions to submit.
Next step personalized recommendations
Continue learning
Move forward only after this module is stable.
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