OpenPrescribing Newsletter: April 2018

Homeopathy Paper Published

Our new paper asks the question: Is use of homeopathy associated with poor prescribing in English primary care? The answer, yes. We found that general practices that have worse than average prescribing scores on our standard measures were more than twice as likely to prescribe homeopathy than practices with better than average scores. Interestingly, the level of homeopathy prescribing we found is quite low and is decreasing quite quickly.

You can find out more about this by reading the paper, which has also picked up some press coverage in New Scientist, The Times, Pulse and Daily Mail.

Gluten-Free Prescribing Paper

Our paper on gluten-free food prescribing and its variation across practices and CCGs has now been published in BMJ Open. It was covered in medical news articles in the BMJ and Pulse, among others, and by the charity Coeliac UK.

You can also read more in our blog.

User tip - The Analyse Page

You can use the Analyse page to investigate variation and trends in any selected part of the BNF, right down to the level of individual presentations. Data can be viewed for all CCGs, with selected CCGs highlighted, or for all practices in your selected CCGs. You can click the play button to watch how the trends change over time, and also download the data. You can find more detail on how to use this tool in our FAQ, including how to choose the right denominators.

Prescribing data update

We"ve updated OpenPrescribing with February’s data. Head over to www.openprescribing.net to see more.

In other news…

Unreported Trial of the Week

Following the launch of our FDAAA TrialsTracker, we have begun writing a series for the BMJ, “Unreported Trial of the Week”

Each week we profile a new unreported clinical trial that has not reported results in accordance with their legal requirements. You can see all four trials we have profiled thus far as well as the introductory post at the BMJ. A short summary and a link to each of the first four trials is provided in our blog.

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