OpenPrescribing Autumn 2025 Newsletter
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The 2025 Bennett Institute Medicines Symposium
You’re invited to be part of the 2025 Bennett Institute Medicines Symposium, an event that brings together everyone working with NHS medicines data. Whether you’re working in healthcare research, policy, or practice, this is a chance to connect and learn from those generating and using UK medicines data.
We’re accepting ideas for talks! We want to hear about how you have used medicines data to understand and improve healthcare delivery in your work. Submit your ideas using this form.
When: Wednesday 10th - Thursday 11th December 2025
Where: Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub, Jesus College, Oxford
Day 1 will feature keynotes, lightning talks, and panel discussions.
Day 2 is dedicated to smaller collaborative meetings and drop in sessions for OpenPrescribing and OpenSAFELY.
For more information on the event, including registration, see the Symposium event page.
We’re looking forward to seeing you in December!
🏆 The Bennett Prize in OpenPrescribing
We are delighted to announce the launch of the Bennett Prize in OpenPrescribing - a new initiative to celebrate the most creative and impactful ways people are using OpenPrescribing.
Entering the Prize is simple: write a short piece explaining what you discovered or achieved with OpenPrescribing, post it publicly (for example, LinkedIn or university page), and then submit the link through our entry form. You could showcase how you identified unusual patterns in prescribing, improved patient safety, or even just uncovered a surprising or quirky insight. Entries are open now, with the deadline on 10 November 2025.
The winners will receive the Bennett Prize Trophy, awarded at the Bennett Symposium and their work will be promoted on our website, blog, and newsletter.
To help you get inspired, we are hosting a webinar on Monday 29 September, 2-3pm, with Professor Ben Goldacre and the OpenPrescribing team. Register here.
Updates to OpenPrescribing Hospitals
Last month we shared our special edition newsletter introducing OpenPrescribing Hospitals. Since then, we’ve made some big updates to our analyse page and added more measures -all based on your feedback.
Multiproduct search is now available!
Following the initial release of the Analyse feature, the three most common requests we received for the analyse page were:
1.        Can we see integrated care board (ICB), region, and national grouping? 2.        How do we see which trusts use the most of a product? 3.        Can we analyse more than one product at a time?
The answer is yes! You can now do all of these things and more, check out our blog to read more about the analyse page
Two new low-value prescribing measures
We’ve added two new measures: co-proxamol and lidocaine patches. Both are identified in  NHS England guidance as low value prescribing. While that guidance has mainly been aimed at primary care, we think it is important to also monitor a selection of these in hospitals - read more about why in our blog.
If you have ideas for new measures or feedback on existing ones, please get in touch via email.
Antimicrobial stewardship guest blog
Do you work in an ICB and wonder how OpenPrescribing could support your antimicrobial stewardship work?
Dr Christianne Micallef, Lead Antimicrobial Stewardship Pharmacist at Cambridgeshire & Peterborough ICB, shares how she uses the tools in practice.
New and updated OpenPrescribing measures
🆕Dapagliflozin: cost savings on the horizon Big news for SGLT-2 inhibitor prescribing! Dapagliflozin has lost its patent. With the NHS price set to fall, there may be opportunities for cost savings compared with other drugs in the class. Explore the measure here.
🆕Access, Watch and Reserve (AWaRe) antibiotics The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has published an updated antimicrobial stewardship tool. Our new measure helps you track:
- Access antibiotics: First-line treatments with lower resistance risk
- Watch antibiotics: Broader-spectrum, use with caution
- Reserve antibiotics: Last-resort options for resistant infections
Find your organisation’s AWaRe breakdown here.
🔄Blood glucose test strips - updated in June 2025 to reflect NHS England’s new commissioning guidance on recommended meters, strips, and lancets.
🔄SABA inhalers - triple inhalers have been removed from the measure, so you may notice changes in your numbers. We’ll share a blog soon explaining this in more detail.
OpenSAFELY News: Expanding beyond COVID
Since the start of the pandemic, the OpenPrescribing team has been building and researching in our powerful OpenSAFELY platform for COVID-19 related research and service monitoring. All the outputs are available on the OpenSAFELY website and our reports website.
The big news is that NHS England has approved expansion of the platform’s capabilities beyond COVID-19 research, enabling approved researchers to study pseudonymised GP data for a wider range of health topics. This pilot is supported by both the BMA and RCGP, and NHS England have emailed practices with all the details. You can read more in Londonwide LMCupdate here.
The Bennett Institute is hiring researchers
We’re looking for Epidemiologists / Health Data Scientists to join our growing research team at the Bennett Institute. The role is centred around OpenSAFELY, a highly secure, modular, open source data analysis platform, combining best practice from both academia and the open source software community. For more info and to apply, see our blog here.