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Hospital Only Measure

Based on feedback received from users, the NHS dictionary of medicines and devices has decided to cease maintenance of the “hospital only” value at AMP level (it remains at AMPP level). As a result this means that we are no longer able to produce our “Hospital Only measure” and we have retired it. We think this is a great example of an openly shared NHS standard responding to feedback from users and iterating the standard. We still think there is a need for identifying medicines that should only be prescribed in hospitals and we will share more on our ideas for this soon!

Total Oral Morphine Equivalence Measure

The Faculty of Pain Medicine has recently updated their recommendation on oral morphine equivalence (OME) which we use on our OpenPrescribing measure of OME. We have taken this opportunity to update and a new novel implementation of how we assess OME. Until this work is completed we have taken the decision to “suspend” the measure from dashboards however you can still view the old method using this link.

OpenPrescribing and Bennett Institute Papers

We recently wrote to the Lancet about trends in antidepressant prescribing in response to claims that there were substantial increases in the rate of antidepressant prescribing. You can read our letter here and see the trends for yourself on OpenPrescribing here.

Methotrexate was made Top 10 paper of BJGP

Our paper on trends and variation in unsafe prescribing of methotrexate made the top 10 of papers published in the British Journal of General Practice. As always we have made a live updating methotrexate prescribing measure on OpenPrescribing so you can see your own organisation’s progress.

OpenCodelists

As part of our OpenSAFELY project we have made a new tool, OpenCodelists, that allows anyone to build, manage, curate and re-use codelists. Read more and watch the videos on the homepage, codelists.opensafely.org, including how to build your own BNF codelist.

OpenSAFELY News

As part of the OpenSAFELY project we are now releasing a weekly vaccination coverage report giving detailed information on vaccine coverage amongst demographic and clinical sub-groups. The report has received lots of attention particularly about the vaccine coverage gap between different ethnic groups, those living in the most and leat deprived area and those with a serious mental ilnness or learning disability. YOu can read our detailed preprint paper on vaccine coverage and our weekly update here.

You can find out more about OpenSAFELY on our website, sign up to the OpenSAFELY mailing list, or follow us on Twitter @OpenSafely. As always we’re keen to hear about how we can improve. If you have any ideas or if there are any research questions related to COVID-19 that you are particularly keen to see answered, please do get in touch: bennett@phc.ox.ac.uk

New Data

We’ve updated OpenPrescribing with January 2021 data. Head over to www.openprescribing.net to explore and sign up to your organisations custom email alert for tailored feedback about your prescribing.