Pharmacist and Data Driven Quality Improvement in Primary Care

P-DQIP is an intervention to improve prescribing safety in primary care. The 'intervention' is a health board quality improvement programme that will be implemented across all practices in one National Health Service (NHS) board in Scotland (Tayside), and comprises the following components:

i. Case finding of patients with drug therapy risks via the P-DQIP informatics tool ii. Decision support for clinicians when conducting medication reviews via the P-DQIP informatics tool iii. Support from practice pharmacists in reviewing and managing targeted patients iv. Ongoing performance feedback via the P-DQIP informatics tool v. Promotion of the P-DQIP tool and intervention among general practices. The P-DQIP intervention will be evaluated in all NHS Tayside practices who agree to share their data for monitoring and evaluation purposes.

P-DQIP is an intervention to improve prescribing safety in primary care. The 'intervention' is a health board quality improvement programme that will be implemented across all practices in NHS Tayside. The study is therefore a service evaluation of an NHS Tayside-led initiative, which comprises the following components:

i. Case finding. The P-DQIP informatics tool will be added to medicines management software (the Scottish Therapeutics Utility), which is already installed in all general practices in NHS Scotland. The P-DQIP tool can be accessed by General Practitioners (GPs) and other clinicians in the practice including Health Board employed primary care pharmacists 'attached' to practices. The core of the tool is a set of indicators of high-risk prescribing to identify patients at high risk of drug related harm. The indicators have been developed by The Scottish Government's Polypharmacy working group.

ii. Decision support. The P-DQIP tool provides structured information on patients' medical and medication histories and highlights specific drug therapy risks for consideration by the reviewing clinician. All decision making remains at the discretion of the reviewing clinician.

iii. Pharmacist support. Teams of practice pharmacists working in practices within the same locality will be invited to participate in a half-day workshop, in which they will be trained on the use of the P-DQIP informatics tool. A total of 8 to 12 workshops will be conducted. The workshop will be facilitated by the P-DQIP project team. As part of the workshop, locality pharmacist teams will be encouraged to plan the P-DQIP work and to agree targets. They will be instructed to introduce the P-DQIP pogramme in a stepwise fashion, targeting patients at risk of bleeding and hypoglycaemia first.

iv. Ongoing performance feedback. Practices and locality pharmacists will be able to access reports on the number of reviews conducted and the numbers of patients with targeted high-risk prescribing via the P-DQIP informatics tool.

v. Promotion of the P-DQIP tool and intervention among GP practices. GP clusters will be offered a visit by the lead pharmacist for the programme, who will provide background and rationale for the P-DQIP programme, demonstrate the functionalities of the P-DQIP informatics tool and encourage collaboration in reviewing and managing targeted drug therapy risks with pharmacists.

Eligibility Criteria:
Inclusion Criteria:

* General practices in NHS Tayside, who use the Vision electronic medical record software and agree to the extraction of data from medical records for monitoring and evaluation purposes

Exclusion Criteria:

* General practices using electronic medical record software other than Vision