Opioid prescribing stewardship using SystmOne

Long-term prescribing of opioids such as tramadol, morphine and codeine can be associated with harmful physical and mental side effects. They take valuable practice time to prescribe and review and often patients aren’t receiving the pain management benefits from opioids that they expect.

Dr Patrick from Ravenscar Surgery in Redcar has used SystmOne Clinical Reporting to identify patients that have had a recent issue from a repeat prescription and those that have not had an issue in the past two months. For those patients without a recent issue the repeat template was stopped. For those who had recently had an issue, patients have been contacted with a view to tapering doses. Dr. Patrick said that the review process is now “really very efficient”.

The proportion of patients on a repeat prescription of opioids declined from 4.7% to 3.3% in 1 year across the practice.

On the whole, patients have been receptive to the review of their opioid medication, many grateful for attention being given to medication courses that have been as long as 20 years.

Dr Parry, Clinical Director at TPP stated “Safer patient care starts with the basics. Accurate data and an action to improve. I really like the elegance of this approach and the benefit is obvious”.

Dr Patrick has shared the clinical reports that he used to identify patient cohorts to SystmOne’s Resource Library. Effectively an ‘App store’ for SystmOne content, organisations can publish their resources to the Resource Library, with supporting guidance. These resources can then be downloaded, reviewed and rated by the thousands of organisations using SystmOne. If a resource published to the Resource Library is updated, then those who have already downloaded it are notified.

To access Dr Patrick’s reports within SystmOne, navigate to System>Resource Library from the main menu bar. Then search for ‘Opioid on rpt issued in last 2mths’ and ‘Opioid on rpt not issued in last 2mths’ published by ‘The Ravenscar Surgery’.

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