The prescribing performance and confidence of final-year medical students.

It is widely believed that medical students are not as well prepared or as sufficiently skilled in prescribing as they should be at the outset of their careers. However, a preclinical context-learning pharmacotherapy program has been found to improve students' therapeutic skills during an ensuing clinical clerkship in internal medicine.(1) In this Commentary, we argue that a similar approach during a clinical clerkship may further enhance therapeutic skills at the end of the clerkship.