OpenPrescribing Newsletter: Autumn 2023

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NHS England Medicines Optimisation Opportunities Dashboard

NHS England has recently launched a new programme of National Medicines Optimisation Opportunities for 2023/24. In response, we have reviewed the 16 key areas of focus and added a category filter to OpenPrescribing which allows every practice, PCN, ICB, and NHS England region to hone in on measures relevant to these recommendations.

This will help inform local discussions about how to best select and address the opportunities set out by NHS England. In this blog we further describe the relevant measures we have in OpenPrescribing and how to access them.

Investigating a sudden £450k per month increase in NHS expenditure on colesevelam tablets

We recently identified a sudden £450k per month increase in NHS expenditure on colesevelam tablets. Using OpenPrescribing tools, we were able to investigate the reasons for this change and track it down to a small reasonable change to the NHS Drug Tariff. In this blog we detail how you can also use OpenPrescribing tools to identify and investigate unusual trends.

Pharmacists behind the scenes at OpenPrescribing

There are six pharmacists that help develop and update prescribing measures that are relevant to the 20k OpenPrescribing users that access our tool every month. We share our time with the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science with NHS roles ranging from an ICB medicines optimisation pharmacist, to a practice-based pharmacist and to pharmacists working in secondary care. Read our blog to find out more about our team.

Sign up for email alerts

At OpenPrescribing we have an email alert service for every single practice, PCN sub-ICB and ICB in England that delivers bespoke custom emails to your inbox about your own organisations prescribing.

If you are not already subscribed to receive our regular email prescribing trend updates for your organisation see our blog for details on how to sign up. If you were already signed up and are no longer getting alerts this may be due to the structural reorganisation last year (CCG to ICB) please sign up again using our blog.

OpenSAFELY News

Since the start of the pandemic, much of the OpenPrescribing team have been building and researching in our powerful new OpenSAFELY platform for COVID-19 related research and service monitoring. You can read all our outputs on the website and our new OpenSAFELY reports website but we think the following analyses will be of interest:

• Eleven key measures for monitoring general practice clinical activity during COVID-19: A retrospective cohort study using 48 million adults’ primary care records in England through OpenSAFELY | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science (ox.ac.uk)
• Changes in medication safety indicators in England throughout the covid-19 pandemic using OpenSAFELY: population based, retrospective cohort study of 57 million patients using federated analytics (bmj.com)
• Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on antipsychotic prescribing in individuals with autism, dementia, learning disability, serious mental illness or living in a care home: a federated analysis of 59 million patients’ primary care records in situ using OpenSafely| BMJ Mental Health