OpenPrescribing Newsletter: Spring 2024

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STAR-PUs: should we still be using them?

STAR-PUs were designed to allow more fair comparisons between geographical areas, and help discern what might be the result of demographic variation versus differences in quality care.

However, to remain valid they need to be recalibrated according to current demographics and prescribing patterns. Since STAR-PUs are now 11 years old, we thought now would be a good time to write a blog about STAR-PUs, in the hope of sparking discussion on their suitability for use and what alternative solutions exist.

💬 Please tell us what you think about this topic by emailing us at bennett@phc.ox.ac.uk or posting on X at @OpenPrescribing. Do you still use STAR-PUs? How confident do you feel about their validity? What alternatives do you think are better?

Improvement Radar: A new OpenPrescribing tool to identify best practice

We have launched the ‘Improvement Radar’ - a new tool on OpenPrescribing which identifies Sub-ICB locations which have shown the greatest improvement across a wide range of prescribing measures. We anticipate this will be useful in enabling discussion with areas that have made effective changes so that successful strategies can be shared. Read this blog to find out more!

💬 Please tell us what you think about the tool and how you use it, by emailing us at bennett@phc.ox.ac.uk or posting on X at @OpenPrescribing.

New research paper reporting medication review and structured medication review activity in primary care in England

We have written two blogs talking about our research on medication review activity including the launch of structured medications reviews during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the first blog we describe how we used the OpenSAFELY platform to report medication review activity from clinical coding in primary care and in the second blog we describe what we found out!

We are recruiting!

Make a difference in NHS research and join us as a:

⭐ Patient and Public Involvement Engagement Lead - closing noon on 23/04/2024

⭐ Epidemiologist / Health Data Scientist - closing noon on 24/04/2024

In these roles you will be vital for driving research with unparalleled access to NHS data on one of the most trusted research platforms, OpenSAFELY. You can read more and find out how to apply here.

We will have several opportunities in research, PPIE, software engineering, informatics and more coming up over the next couple of months. Please keep an eye on our website here - and tell all your friends!

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 recent research publications will be of interest:

• The impact of COVID-19 on medication reviews in English primary care. An OpenSAFELY-TPP analysis of 20 million adult electronic health records.
• The impact of COVID-19 on azathioprine, leflunomide and methotrexate monitoring, and factors associated with change in monitoring rate.