Better access to information reduces unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions

A new study in the Journal of antimicrobial chemotherapy suggests that providing more information on how doctors prescribe medication could reduce the problems badociated with over-prescription.

In 2016, the National Health Service described antibiotic resistance as "one of the most important threats to patient safety in the world". Antibiotics are often the prescription of choice for many primary care cases, but researchers estimate that 23% of these prescriptions may be inappropriate. An increased consumption of antibiotics can lead to inefficient drugs in the fight against infections.

In 2013, the Chief Medical Officer for England presented a five-year plan to combat this. Part of this plan is a publicly funded service that creates a website that provides physicians with prescription data by practice and by month.

Five years after the launch of this strategy, researchers sought to determine whether the antimicrobial resistance strategy had a measurable impact on the global prescription of antibiotics in England.

The researchers calculated the volume of antibiotic prescriptions using annual prescription data from 1998 to 2016 and monthly from October 2010 to June 2018. After several years of prescription rates of stable antibiotics, the downward trend was observed after 2013. 14% decrease in the number of antibiotic prescriptions between 2012 and 2017, in a context of increasing the size of the population .

Although researchers can not strongly attribute causality to reducing the number of prescriptions, they feel that the scale and timing of the changes are worth mentioning. The significant change followed a long period of relatively static prescription of antibiotics.

"We are delighted to announce a substantial change in practices, starting in 2013, with 9.7 million fewer prescriptions compared to last year," said Lt.E. one of the researchers, Ben Goldacre, "but there is still a lot of work to be done to spread the best practices".

Provided by
Oxford University Press