Effective Feedback to Improve Primary Care Prescribing Safety

High risk prescribing is the use of drugs which carry significant risk to patients. Such prescribing is not always inappropriate but does require regular review to ensure that the balance of risk and benefit in individuals is appropriate. High risk prescribing is common and varies widely between practices, and there is evidence that intensive interventions (for example, pharmacist led medication review) can reduce rates of high risk prescribing. The aim of this study is to test whether a simpler and therefore cheaper feedback intervention can reduce high risk prescribing. The study is a three arm cluster randomised trial with primary care medical practices as the unit of randomisation and outcomes measured at patient level using routinely held prescribing for individual patients. The trial will compare two forms of feedback of practice rates of high risk prescribing with usual care. Usual care matches existing NHS working practice. The first active arm will receive quarterly feedback. The second active arm will receive the same feedback plus a health psychology informed intervention designed to promote response to feedback embedded in the feedback.

Inclusion criteria

• General medical practices in NHS Ayrshire and Arran, NHS Lanarkshire and NHS Lothian

Exclusion criteria

• Practices with <250 registered patients
• Practices with <93% of scripts in the new PIS data warehouse having a unique patient identifier (the Community Health Index [CHI] number)
• Practices which were formed after 1st January 2011
• Practices which cease to exist during the trial
• Practices which merge during the trial, where the merging practices were originally in different arms of the trial