Innovations in Prescribing Information: Report of the UK Drug Utilisation Research Group Regional Meeting, King's Conference Centre, University of Aberdeen, Wednesday May 31, 1995
✍ Scribed by Findlay Hickey
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 446 KB
- Volume
- 5
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1053-8569
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Officer, NHS Executive, Department of Health presented an overview of prescribing indicators. He defined a prescribing indicator as 'an indicative measure, which may be relative, of the quality and/or cost of prescribing'. They could be used for three overlapping purposes: to raise awareness, targeting interventions. and audit. The principles that underlie prescribing indicators are patients' clinical needs, safety, risk/benefit, and care monitoring and management .
A consensus group from Leeds identified desirable characteristics for prescribing indicators: they should be comprehensive, covering a range of indications and, ideally, with more than one per therapeutic area; there should be local or practice 'ownership'; they should be evidence-based (or established practice), relevant, realistic and understandable. In addition, they should be obtainable, reliable, repeatable, responsive and weighted, for instance, by number of patients, age, sex and ethnicity .
'ASTRO-PU' stands for Age Sex Temporary Residence Originated Prescribing Unit; 'STAR-PU' for Specific Therapeutic Age Related Prescribing Unit. In overall prescribing, the PU system is insensitive to the composition of the population of an individual practice. To remedy this, ASTRO-PUS were created -they have nine age groups for each sex and are therefore far more sensitive. Even ASTRO-PUS are inappropriate when specific therapeutic groups are being considered, because for each of these there will be differences in relative use for the different age/sex groups. The STAR-PU (specific therapeutic group agelsex related) system is a set of weightings for the same 18 age/sex groups as the ASTRO-PUS, for each of the eight leading specific therapeutic groups.