The medicines safety quality improvement projects (MSQIPs) formed part of our Cheshire Prescribing incentive scheme 2022/23. We wanted to champion patient safety and service improvement and decided to use the scheme to prioritise four key areas identified through the NHSBSA dashboard. The dashboard is a set of prescribing indicators which have been developed as part of a programme of work to reduce medication error and promote safer use of medicines, including prescribing, dispensing, administration, and monitoring.
The areas we chose to focus on were:
• Opioids prescribed without a laxative
• Benzodiazepines and/or Z drugs prescribed for >1 month
• Patients At risk of AKI - Prescribed NSAID + RAS + diuretic
• Patients prescribed 1 or more medicines for dementia + 1 or more medicines with moderate or high anticholinergic activity.
These four topics correspond to the dashboard’s medication safety indicators in which Cheshire CCG had an opportunity for health improvement. We selected these four as we could apply a consistent health improvement methodology to them.
Following completion of our projects we observed that there was a decrease in patent numbers in each of the at-risk categories. There were also a range of interventions made by practices which will benefit future patients and prevent them falling into these at-risk categories.
