Conclusion In this study, all undergraduate medical schools in the UK were found to offer some form of community-based teaching in their medical curriculum. The delivery of CBE varied broadly, but all forms of community teaching were generally found to be beneficial and was therefore well-received by students, patients, participating staff and medical schools. The challenges and cost issues

thereby of community teaching should also not be overlooked, and solutions to address these need to be explored such that the delivery of CBE may be improved. Under the pressures of social demographics and political drivers to incorporate more community-based teaching in medical education, there is a need to ensure that CBE is delivered at acceptable quality standards for it to achieve its anticipated benefits. A national framework would need to be established to ensure these standards are met. This would then succeed to act as a standardised national guideline for evaluating the effectiveness of CBE programmes in developing professional competencies that are expected of ‘Tomorrow’s Doctors’. Supplementary

Material Author’s manuscript: Click here to view.(5.2M, pdf) Reviewer comments: Click here to view.(131K, pdf) Footnotes Contributors: WA came up with the concept of the study. NC performed the medical school online survey. SWWL and NT performed the literature review. SWWL, NC and NT wrote the draft of the manuscript. SWWL, NC, NT and WA were involved in editing the manuscript. Funding: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial

or not-for-profit sectors. Competing interests: None. Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed. Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Prescription claims databases are important sources of information on medications dispensed in community pharmacies, and are increasingly being used to estimate the level of adherence to medications prescribed for the treatment of chronic diseases.1–7 The days’ supply, defined as the number of days of supply of the medication provided to the patient for a filled prescription and recorded in prescription claims databases, is used to calculate several Drug_discovery measures of adherence such as the medication possession ratio,8 9 the proportion of days covered,8 9 and the proportion of prescribed days covered.10 The latter is an adherence measure that we recently developed and that accounts for variations in the way the medication is prescribed via the number of refills allowed,10 which corresponds to a specific number or time frame indicated by the prescriber allowing the patient to obtain more of the same medication without getting a new prescription from the doctor. Treatment adherence is an issue for the majority of chronic diseases, but is dramatically low for inhaled corticosteroids (ICS), the cornerstone therapy in asthma.