Lidocaine plasters measure in OpenPrescribing Hospitals

We’ve launched a new OpenPrescribing Hospitals ‘low value prescribing’ measure for lidocaine plasters. It’s already live on the site - you can view it here.

Low value prescribing

We previously wrote a blog about the NHS England ‘Low value prescribing’ guidance. We wrote why we think, for many of the items included in the guidance, the ‘low value’ applies as much in secondary care as it does in primary care.

OpenPrescribing Hospitals measures are designed to help highlight variation across hospitals. Measures are based on national prescribing guidance. We have built measures looking at low value prescribing, with a plan to expand this over time based on the feedback received:

• Doxazosin modified-release
• Perindopril arginine

A number of users have suggested a lidocaine plaster measure would be helpful to identify variation across hospitals, and would complement the existing OpenPrescribing primary care lidocaine plaster measure. So we’ve added an OpenPrescribing Hospitals lidocaine plaster measure here!

We’ve thought carefully about a good denominator to use for this measure. Denominators help to normalise measure values for hospital size or throughput. In this case, we have not been able to select a meaningful denominator. This will therefore be our first measure without. Instead, we will be presenting a count of lidocaine plasters issued. When viewing this measure it’s therefore important to take this into consideration when interpreting variation. We’d love to hear though if you have any suggestions of what would make a good denominator for this measure.

What next?

As a small team of clinicians, academics, and software engineers, we are able to build and launch dashboards quickly by working in an agile manner, openly describing our methods and code. If you have any suggestions for further developments of our Low Value Prescribing measures or any suggestions in general for OpenPrescribing Hospitals, please get in touch at bennett@phc.ox.ac.uk.