Five new low value prescribing measures launched in OpenPrescribing Hospitals
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We’ve launched five more low value prescribing measures on OpenPrescribing Hospitals, taking us up to a total of eight low value prescribing measures.
Why add these measures?
We previously wrote a blog post about NHS England’s Low value prescribing guidance explaining 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.
We started with a small number of measures looking at low value prescribing, with a plan to expand this over time based on feedback from users.
A user recently suggested adding measures looking at bath/shower emollients and rubefacients, both of which are included in NHS England’s guidance because of limited evidence for clinical and cost effectiveness. Whilst creating these, we took the opportunity to look again at the guidance, and consider additional items that might be useful to include. We focused on items where there is a clear case that the product is also not routinely recommended for use in hospitals for similar reasons to primary care, such as limited evidence of clinical or cost effectiveness, or concerns about safety.
Three measures focus on items considered to lack evidence for clinical and cost effectiveness:
- Bath and shower emollients
- Rubefacients, benzydamine, mucopolysaccharide and cooling products
- Aliskiren
Two measures focus on items with concerns about clinical effectiveness or safety:
Explore your data
You can also use our analyse page to investigate the use of medicines across NHS Trusts, ICBs, regions and nationally.
For example, you can explore trends in other low value prescribing products included in the NHS England guidance, including:
- Minocycline - NHS England guidance
- Omega-3 fatty acid compounds (excluding icosapent ethyl) - NHS England guidance
- Oxycodone and naloxone combination products - NHS England guidance
Get in touch
As a small team of clinicians, academics, and software engineers, we build and launch measures quickly by working in an agile manner, openly describing our methods and code. If you have any comments on these measures or suggestions for further developments of our measures on OpenPrescribing or OpenPrescribing Hospitals, please get in touch at bennett@phc.ox.ac.uk.