Prescribing & Medicines Management
Issue no 1, p3
January/February 2003

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Second wave pilots making good progress

PCTs in the second wave of pilots from the English medicines management collaborative are already making good progress on each of the four practice level improvement measures just six months after going live.

Data from the 40 second-wave sites show that the proportion of patients aged over 65 years who are taking four or more medicines who have had a medication review in the past year has risen from 28 per cent to 42 per cent — a 50 per cent increase.

The data also show that patient satisfaction with repeat prescriptions has improved. Overall, the percentage of people who said that they had experienced a problem with their repeat prescription fell from 3.5 to 2 per cent.

The percentage of prescriptions being written without specific dosage instructions has also fallen, the six-month data show.

Overall, just 12.5 per cent of prescriptions for more than one item contained no specific dose instructions, down from the 20 per cent reported at the baseline of the study.

However, slower progress is being made on measure two, which was designed to reduce the proportion of repeat prescriptions that do not contain all of the items.

Six-month data shows that the proportion of incomplete repeat prescriptions has fallen, but only from 48 per cent to 42 per cent overall.

The second wave of PCTs selected to be in wave two of the medicines management collaborative, being led by the National Prescribing Centre, Liverpool, went live in June last year.