AIM To explore stakeholder views on the impact of nurse prescribing on dermatology services. BACKGROUND Nurse led care enhances the services that dermatology patients receive. Research indicates that care delivered by nurse prescribers can improve efficiency and access to medicines. There is no evidence exploring the impact of nurse prescribing on the configuration of dermatology services. ...

BACKGROUND General practice accounts for the vast majority of drug prescribing in the Nordic countries. Various methods have been used to promote rational drug prescribing. Awareness of own prescribing profile may be a first crucial step in the quality assessment and improvement process. AIM OF THE STUDY To analyse awareness among general practitioners of their drug prescribing profile during...

BACKGROUND Prescribing of antibiotics for common infections varies widely, and there is no medical explanation. Systematic reviews have highlighted factors that may influence antibiotic prescribing and that this is a complex process. It is unclear how factors interact and how the primary care organization affects diagnostic procedures and antibiotic prescribing. Therefore, we sought to explore ...

BACKGROUND Australian General Practitioners (GPs) are generous prescribers of antibiotics, prompting concerns including increasing antimicrobial resistance in the community. Recent data show that GPs in vocational training have prescribing patterns comparable with the high prescribing rate of their established GP supervisors. Evidence-based guidelines consistently advise that antibiotics are no...

This study examined whether a significant change in antibiotic use caused by an Australian government directive targeted at amoxicillin with clavulanic acid (AC) was associated with changes in prescription share, health care costs, and patient outcomes. We used an integrated database of computerized general practice medical records, which included data regarding 34,242 patients and 318,234 reco...

The total prescribing in an urban general practice was recorded over a six-month period and classified according to the length of time that drugs were continued. The number of patients receiving any prescription rose with age, as did the total number of items per patient prescribed for; while the continued items rose with age, the number of items prescribed once only per patient remained consta...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE More than one third of American adults are obese. Extreme obesity is rapidly rising. Nine medications are approved for weight loss yet they remain underutilized with the focus primarily on lifestyle modifications. The objective was to determine current prescribing patterns and attitudes of weight loss medications in the management of obesity among primary care providers (...

We report the design of a three-arm RCT to compare the effectiveness of enhanced audit and feedback strategies for the translation into practice of published guidance on antibiotic prescribing in dentistry. The trial uses linked healthcare data from administrative datasets (dental workforce data linked with claims for treatment provision and pharmacy data) in five aspects of the trial to: 1. id...

BACKGROUND Current health policies assume that prescribing is more efficient and rational when general practitioners (GPs) work with a formulary or restricted drugs lists and thus with a limited range of drugs. Therefore we studied determinants of the range of drugs prescribed by general practitioners, distinguishing general GP-characteristics, characteristics of the practice setting, character...

BACKGROUND Although prescribing of medication in hospitals is rarely an error-free process, prescribers receive little feedback on their mistakes and ways to change future practices. Audit and feedback interventions may be an effective approach to modifying the clinical practice of health professionals, but these may pose logistical challenges when used in hospitals. Moreover, such intervention...