Virtual On-Call: Use of Low-Fidelity Simulation to Improve Preparedness for Practice.

Background Many newly qualified doctors feel unprepared for clinical practice. The literature identifies themes including difficulties with clinical reasoning, emergency management, handover, and prioritization of tasks. Although there is an expected level of anxiety for newly qualified doctors, this appears to be amplified with respect to the first on-call shifts that encompass these themes.

Mechanistic in vitro studies confirm that inhibition of the renal apical efflux transporter multidrug and toxin extrusion (MATE) 1, and not altered absorption, underlies the increased metformin exposure observed in clinical interactions with cimetidine, trimethoprim or pyrimethamine.

Metformin is a common co-medication for many diseases and the victim of clinical drug-drug interactions (DDIs) perpetrated by cimetidine, trimethoprim and pyrimethamine, resulting in decreased active renal clearance due to inhibition of organic cation transport proteins and increased plasma exposure of metformin. To understand whether area under the plasma concentration-time curve (AUC) increases relate to absorption, in vitro inhibitory potencies of these drugs against metformin transport by human organic cation transporter (OCT) 1, and the apical to basolateral absorptive permeability of metformin across Caco-2 cells in the presence of therapeutic intestinal concentrations of cimetidine, trimethoprim or pyrimethamine, were determined. Whilst all inhibited OCT1, none enhanced metformin's absorptive permeability (~0.