Promoting Patient Safety and Safe Prescribing

Different clinicians play different, important roles in a patient’s care. It is essential to patient safety that a medically trained clinician, like a psychiatrist, prescribes and manages mental health medications. 

Powerful Psychiatric Drugs Affect the Mind and the Body
Powerful psychiatric drugs, some of the most potent medications in modern medicine, affect not only the mind but the entire body and can interact poorly with other drugs. More than half of patients living with mental illness also have an underlying physical illness. Advanced medical training is required to understand how psychiatric drugs affect the entire body and interact with other medications.

OUR POSITION:
For safely prescribing mental health medication, medical doctors like psychiatrists have a clear advantage over psychologists.

It is essential to patient safety that a medically trained clinician like a psychiatrist prescribes and manages a patient’s mental health medications. Graduating medical school, earning a state medical license, going through residency and often a specialty fellowship program, and years of on-the-job expertise, ensures psychiatrists understand:

• How psychiatric drugs interact with other medications.

• How psychiatric drugs affect not only a person’s mind, but other organ systems.

• The difference between psychiatric conditions and other illnesses and diseases that may look like a mental health issue but require other medical treatments.

Psychologists have no clinical medical training, compared to psychiatrists who have 12,000-16,000 hours of specialized clinical psychiatric training.