OpenPrescribing Spring 2026 Newsletter

If you’ve been forwarded this newsletter, you can sign up for our newsletter mailing list here.

A new version of OpenPrescribing is on its way!

After 10 years, the code behind OpenPrescribing is beginning to show its age. To make better use of more modern data science technologies, including new features, we’ve started to build a new version from the ground up. Keep an eye out on our blog for updates on what we’re up to.

In the meantime, you can have a play with our new analyse page, which gives you lots of additional options for choosing the drugs, and new information on the chart, such as deciles.

As the tool is currently in beta testing, it may not work perfectly or look quite as finished as we’d like. Please email bennett@phc.ox.ac.uk to let us know what you think about it and if there are any new features you’d like to see.

Members needed for new OpenPrescribing measures advisory group

We want to make sure new OpenPrescribing measures are as useful and relevant as possible, so we’re setting up an advisory group to help shape them. When a new measure is drafted, we will invite feedback from this group before it goes live.

We’re looking for people with a range of backgrounds, professions and levels of experience. If you’re interested, drop us an email at bennett@phc.ox.ac.uk with your name, a bit about your background, and how you use OpenPrescribing. We’d love to hear from you.

Levemir® (insulin detemir) discontinuation - are you ready?

A reminder that Novo Nordisk is discontinuing all Levemir products, with supply expected to run out by December 2026. If your organisation still has patients on this, now is the time to switch to alternative insulins.

We have measures on both OpenPrescribing and OpenPrescribing Hospitals to help you identify current use and track progress. To learn more, read the blog here.

The Bennett Prize in OpenPrescribing 2025 Winners

At the Bennett Symposium in December, we were delighted to present the Bennett Prize in OpenPrescribing. The prize celebrates the creative and impactful ways our users are putting OpenPrescribing to work - the entries did not disappoint!

The winners have since published guest blogs on our website. To learn more about how each of the winners used OpenPrescribing data in their projects, read their blog posts and watch their presentations below.

Updates to OpenPrescribing Hospitals

OpenPrescribing Hospitals - all measures for your own hospital trust on one page

We have updated the measures page on OpenPrescribing Hospitals based on user feedback.

Users said they wanted to:

1. Look at a measure across all trusts.
2. Look at all measures at their own trust.

The new measures pages also lets users filter organisations based on trust type (acute hospital, mental health trust, community organisation), by Cancer Alliance, and by NHS organisation (ICG and region).

New Prototypes

Try our new Hospital FP10 viewer

During user testing sessions with hospital pharmacy teams, we kept hearing the same question: “but what about FP10 prescribing?” An FP10 is the standard NHS prescription form. Most are written by GPs, but hospitals use them too, such as for outpatient prescriptions or urgent medication when the hospital pharmacy is closed. While FP10s account for only around 1% of hospital medicines costs, the questions were so consistent that we decided to take a look.

The result is a new prototype tool that lets anyone explore national hospital FP10 prescription data. It’s still early days, and it’s liable to break, but we’d love your feedback to help us decide where to take it next. If you have feedback, please email bennett@phc.ox.ac.uk

You can access the Hospital FP10 viewer here and learn more by reading the blog here.

New and updated OpenPrescribing measures

🆕 Oral morphine liquid measures (Primary Care)
Inspired by a brilliant presentation from Vanessa Sherwood at the Bennett Symposium, we’ve launched two new measures looking at oral liquid morphine prescribing.
The two new measures are:

• Total volume of oral morphine solution prescribed per registered patient.
  View the measure
• Prescribing of oral morphine solution in quantities over 300 ml.
  View the measure.

🆕 IV paracetamol measure (OpenPrescribing Hospitals)

IV paracetamol is significantly more expensive than oral paracetamol and has a higher carbon footprint. Our new measure compares IV paracetamol use against total paracetamol use (oral and IV) for each hospital trust, making it easy to benchmark against peers and track progress over time.

You can find out more by reading our blog here.

🆕 Antibiotics measures (OpenPrescribing Hospitals)

We’ve just launched two new measures to support antimicrobial stewardship in hospitals:

• AWaRe (Access, Watch and Reserve) antibiotics - this looks at the proportion of antibiotic use falling into the WHO’s “Watch” and “Reserve” categories. Keeping these as low as clinically appropriate helps combat antibiotic resistance. View the measure
• Intravenous vs oral antibiotics -switching from IV to oral where clinically appropriate can reduce infection risk, equipment costs, carbon footprint and hospital length of stay. View the measure