Enhancing safety and efficiency in repeat prescribing: introducing the new toolkit

Over the last year, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) and the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) have been developing a practical repeat prescribing toolkit designed to ‘improve the consistency, safety and efficiency of repeat prescribing systems in general practices in England’. 

Commissioned by NHS England following the National Overprescribing Review in 2021, the guide seeks to provide a framework that enables GP Practices and Primary Care Networks, working in collaboration with community pharmacies and patients, to streamline workloads, improve patient safety and care, address potential oversupply and reduce medicines waste.

77% of the 1 billion prescriptions dispensed annually in England are repeat prescriptions, which also account for 80% of NHS costs for primary care. Alongside these costs, repeat prescriptions create significant workloads as poorly operated repeat prescribing has a knock-on impact for overprescribing and problematic polypharmacy. Conducting good medication reviews and analysing repeat prescriptions are core to the role of pharmacists in general practice, which the toolkit helps to streamline.

The toolkit provides information to support clinical decision making for pharmacists working in general practice. For example, it outlines how to improve communication with patients about repeat prescribing, particularly with complex medication issues and management of long-term conditions, which GP pharmacists are strategically placed to support with. It also includes a new NHS dashboard which highlights the scale of potential oversupply of medicines, meaning issues can be flagged earlier and shared across clinical and care settings.

The potential benefits of this toolkit and its role in reducing repeat prescribing and overprescribing are significant. Safe and appropriate prescribing is a key skill for GPs, so helping steer GP practice and PCN stakeholders to identify prescribing risks and how to address them is valuable to ensure systems are run safely and reduce unnecessary burdens on the clinical workforce. By ensuring that repeat prescribing systems work well for both patients and NHS primary care teams, we will move towards more integrated care systems that are more efficient and keep patients safe.

At CPC North, hear from prominent figures involved in the development of the toolkit, including Professor Tony Avery, National Clinical Director for Prescribing at NHS England speaking on Friday 1 November (10:45-11:30) in Clinical Theatre 1.