Medicine safety: indicators for safer prescribing
A series of indicators to inform safer prescribing practice to help pharmacists, clinicians and patients review prescribed medication and prevent harm.
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Following recommendations in the report of the Short Life Working Group on reducing medication-related harm, the Medicines Safety Programme is developing a series of prescribing indicators.
The experimental indicators link prescribing data with hospital admissions for the first time. The purpose is to identify prescribing that could potentially increase the risk of harm, and that may be associated with hospital admission.
The aim of the indicators are to:
- support local reviews of prescribing
- minimise unnecessary prescribing
- identify where alternative medicines or medicines that reduce risk could be prescribed
- reduce the number of patients who are potentially at increased risk of harm from medicines and the number of hospital admissions associated with that risk
Professionals registered with the ePACT2 service can access the prescription level data. ePACT2 is an application that gives authorised users access to prescription data.
Other users should access the data through the NHSBSA Catalyst public insight portal. This is an open access service that aims to improve quality, patient outcomes and value from the use of medicines.