NHS Dorset ICBs 'Only Order What You Need' (OOWYN) work was a systemwide patient empowerment campaign to reduce unnecessary primary care medicines prescribing over February and March 2024. It used a multi-modal communications campaign to reach patients on repeat medications and educate them on their ability to step back from requesting every item available to them, every month.
The information provided to patients was curated to tackle common misconceptions and concerns amongst our population and provided positive logic and reassurance for taking action.
Following the campaign, prescriptions fell below baseline by 15,940 compared to the same months of 2023, equalling a total fall in prescribed repeat items of 65,152 over the last two months of the financial year 2023/2024. EPACT2 data demonstrated that primary care prescription costs fell by £475,000 over the same time. Estimating that each item occupies 1 minute of health professional time, the OOWYN campaign liberated 1085 hours for alternative health care activity. Although this time would have been recouped over the medicines use system (General Practice and Community Pharmacy) as an indicator of benefit, this equates to the same amount of time as approximately 6500 GP appointments.
Certain GP surgeries found the impact of the campaign on workload to be so positively significant that they independently utilised elements of it again in April 2024.Using the UK government carbon emission factor for pharmaceuticals (0.621 kgCO2e /£) this project is estimated to have prevented production of 294,975kgCO2e - a key determinant of planetary and human health.
