OpenPrescribing Newsletter: Autumn 2026

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OpenPrescribing Webinars - Sign up here

We are planning a series of webinars to help users get the most out of our OpenPrescribing and OpenPrescribing Hospitals platforms. There will be a variety of themes depending on your particular area of work or interest.

Two of our November sessions coincide with key awareness weeks, Medicines Safety Week and World Antimicrobial Resistance Awareness Week.

There will be some overlap between the sessions, so there’s no need to attend them all. We suggest choosing the session that is most relevant to you.

How to use OpenPrescribing to support medicines safety

Tuesday 3rd November 2026, 1–2pm

Coinciding with #MedSafetyWeek

Register here

OpenPrescribing Refresher / Introduction

Tuesday 10th November 2026, 1–2pm

Register here

OpenPrescribing Hospitals Refresher / Introduction

Tuesday 17th November 2026, 1–2pm

Register here

How to use OpenPrescribing to support antimicrobial stewardship

Tuesday 24th November 2026, 1–2pm

Coinciding with World Antimicrobial Resistance Awareness Week 2026

Register here

OpenPrescribing advanced workshop

Tuesday 1st December 2026, 1–2pm

Featuring OpenPrescribing and OpenPrescribing Hospitals

Register here

Measures, measures, and more measures

Over the last few months, we have been busy building new measures for both OpenPrescribing (Primary Care) and for OpenPrescribing Hospitals. Measures are built based on national guidance or standards, and, for the most part, are suggested by users.

We’ve also recently established a Measures Advisory Group to gather feedback from a range of users before we launch them. Thanks to group members - it’s great to have you onboard!

Here are some of the measures we’ve been working on.

AIR/MART inhalers

The first measure that we tested out with our Measures Advisory Group was a new AIR/MART inhaler measure looking at how prescribing of inhalers used for asthma has changed following the publication of the BTS/NICE/SIGN asthma guideline in November 2024. The measures report the percentage of corticosteroid-containing inhaler doses from inhalers not licensed for AIR/MART therapy.

Read more in our blog.

Prolonged-release morphine and oxycodone

We have added our first opioid measure to OpenPrescribing Hospitals. This measure was suggested by one of our users who had been looking at the use of prolonged-release morphine and oxycodone after surgery at their trust following a recent Drug Safety Update from the MHRA. The Drug Safety Update advised healthcare professionals that prolonged-release opioids should not be used to treat acute pain after surgery.

Read more in our blog.

More on opioids

In case you missed it, we have also added two new opioid measures to OpenPrescribing in primary care, looking at oral liquid morphine prescribing, after a fantastic presentation by the brilliant Vanessa Sherwood at the Bennett Symposium last year.

The two new measures are:

• Total volume of oral morphine solution prescribed per registered patient.
  View the measure
• Prescribing of oral morphine solution in quantities over 300 ml.
  View the measure

Low Value Measures

We have added to our low value measures in OpenPrescribing Hospitals. This was prompted by a conversation with one of our users in secondary care who had been looking at local use of low value products such as lidocaine patches using our existing measures, but also wanted to look at bath/shower emollients and rubefacients.

We took the opportunity to look again at the guidance, and consider additional items that might be useful to include. We focused on items where there is a clear case that the product is also not routinely recommended for use in hospitals for similar reasons to primary care. For example, limited evidence of clinical or cost effectiveness, or concerns about safety.

Three measures focus on items lacking evidence for clinical and cost effectiveness:

• Bath and shower emollients
• Rubefacients, benzydamine, mucopolysaccharide and cooling products
• Aliskiren

Two measures focus on items with concerns about clinical effectiveness or safety:

• Dronedarone
• Dosulepin

These measures are all available in primary care. We hope that teams will be able to look across the system for opportunities to reduce the use of low value medicines where appropriate.

Read more in our blog

Subcutaneous Pembrolizumab

We have launched our fourth OpenPrescribing measure for a new subcutaneous formulation of a common anti-cancer therapy previously only available via an intravenous infusion.

In May 2026, a new formulation of pembrolizumab, designed to be administered as a subcutaneous injection in a fraction of the time, became available for use in the UK, and received support for rollout across the NHS from NHS England. The subcutaneous preparation can be given every 3 weeks as a 1-minute injection or every 6 weeks as a 2-minute injection, depending on an individual’s cancer type.

It is early days for this measure, since the new product was only launched in May 2026, but we are excited to watch it grow.

• View uptake of pembrolizumab subcutaneous measure in hospitals
• View all the cancer therapy measures in hospitals

Read more in our blog.

% Vitamin K antagonists as a proportion of all oral anticoagulants (OpenPrescribing Hospitals)

We built this measure based on feedback from anticoagulation pharmacists curious about variation in the use of warfarin rather than direct oral anticoagulants (DOAC) between hospitals.

This was prompted because the anticoagulation pharmacists said that there are still patients who are coming into hospital anticoagulated with warfarin who could be eligible to switch.

• View % of oral anticoagulants issued as vitamin K antagonists measure in hospitals

Read more in our blog.

Finalised data up to March 2026 is now available in OpenPrescribing Hospitals.

We’ve previously written about the difference between provisional and finalised data in the Secondary Care Medicines Dataset (SCMD).

Monthly data within the SCMD are initially published as provisional data and are subject to change as trusts can update historical issues to reflect actual use. This is known as backtracking. After the end of the financial year, once backtracking is accounted for, data are published as finalised data.

OpenPrescribing Hospitals presents the latest available data, using the finalised data where available, and the provisional data where not.

You can also sign up to our OpenPrescribing Hospitals email alerts to be the first to hear about important new developments and also to be notified when new data is available on the site.