Inequalities in Overprescribing, CY P06 24 01

Patients often receive medicines that they do not want, do not need or that can do more harm than good. This is called overprescribing. It increases the risks of side effects from medicines, hospital admissions and even deaths. Overprescribing also wastes medicines, time and money. Overprescribing is strongly linked to health inequalities, the avoidable and unfair differences in health between different groups of people. Poorer areas are linked with more prescriptions of addictive painkillers and antibiotics.
There are several approaches to reduce overprescribing. One of them, audit and feedback, means showing clinicians (GPs, pharmacists and nurses) how much they prescribe compared to other clinicians. The feedback highlights those who prescribe more than others so that they can make changes to reduce this. We have run a feedback campaign that reduced overprescribing of addictive painkillers in general practice. We are now running a similar campaign to reduce unnecessary antibiotic prescribing. We want to find out if it works without making it more difficult for some people to get the health care they need, making health inequalities worse.
We will analyse changes in prescribing by practice and patient characteristics using data from primary care health records before and after the feedback was delivered.

16/03/2021

4 years