Remediation required for drug-dose calculation skills in medical students

To the Editor: We are pleased that Simpson and colleagues brought the important matter of drug-dose calculation skills among Australian hospital doctors to the attention of the wider medical community.1 Data similar to theirs, suggesting inadequate calculation skills, have been reported from the United Kingdom and Germany.2-4 As teachers in the MB BS course of the University of Adelaide, we have been concerned with deficiencies in the clinical numeracy skills of our students for some time. Such deficiencies among medical students have been reported from North Carolina,5 but to our knowledge no information has been available about Australian medical students.