OpenPrescribing January 2018 Newsletter

New Year - same Price Concessions issues…

Everyone at the Bennett Institute wishes you a very Happy New Year!

Unfortunately, the NHS is still having the same problems in sourcing generics. The PSNC announced the latest list of price concessions for December 2017, slightly smaller than November’s, with 86 lines. However, we still estimated a monthly impact for the NHS in December of £27 million, bringing the total excess cost for the nine months to December to £285 million:

As always, we used the latest available month’s prescribing data (in this case October 2017) to estimate the impact for November and December, and updated our calculations for October as an actual cost.

Read more here, and look out for an update when January’s list is released.

Trends and variation in gluten-free food prescribing

Our analysis and the OpenPrescribing site show that areas where gluten free prescribing is restricted do have much lower rates of gluten-free prescribing, if you look at the map below in comparison with the prescribing policy map.

We’ve also determined that there is a lot of variation amongst practices, with some practices prescribing none at all. What is clear is that there is a recent trend over the last two years towards a drop in overall prescribing.

There are potential clinical benefits to doctors being able to prescribe gluten-free foods, and there are potential cost saving advantages to restricting their prescribing. However the current situation is a strange and rapidly changing middle ground, where availability is different according to where you live.

Our preprint paper explores this issue further, including investigating some of the factors associated with volume of gluten-free prescribing, such as practice list size or deprivation score. You can also explore the volume of gluten-free prescribing at any CCG or practice on OpenPrescribing.net.

OpenPrescribing project page update

We have updated our project page so it now gives a brief summary of each of the functions of the site: /openprescribing/ - take a look to be sure you’re making the most of all the features!