Guide to the National Support Materials

The NPC national support materials provide access to online and downloadable resources that address selected prescribing and medicines management priorities within the NHS.

The materials are intended to raise awareness of the important issues within each topic and provide support to individuals and organisations to make changes to current ways of working. They cover policy and guidance, therapeutics and implementation and monitoring at a local level.

Selection of topics is informed by national priority areas for prescribing and medicines management, highlighted by national bodies and NHS organisations

• Department of Health
• NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement
• National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)
• National Patient Safety Agency
• Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA)
• National Audit Office
• Healthcare Commission

Each topic includes both therapeutics and implementation resources.

Increasing low cost statin prescribing

Increasing low cost statin prescribing (prescription items for simvastatin and pravastatin as a percentage of the total number of prescriptions for all statins) is one of the "better value, better care" indicators of efficiency published by the NHS Institute in October 2006. These indicators identify areas for potential improvements in efficiency and will form part of a portfolio of NHS performance measures.

http://www.institute.nhs.uk/PriorityProgrammes/DeliveringQualityAndValue/better_value_better_care_indicators.htm

The volume of statin prescribing has increased several-fold during recent years and there are large differences in cost between the different drugs. By ensuring that clinicians initiate patients on one of the lower cost drugs, PCTs can keep statin prescribing costs down. In addition, many will wish to review prescribing of these drugs for patients prescribed one of the more costly versions.

Therapeutics Resources
The therapeutics materials outline the evidence based for prescribing and are provided in a variety of formats to suit individual learning styles.

Implementation resources
Materials to support implementation and facilitate change. Please note that some of the resources are provided as templates intended for local adaptation. The remainder are not intended to be changed. They can be found in the Implementation Resources room.

Acknowledgements
The National Prescribing Centre would like to acknowledge the support of all of the individuals and organisations that have shared their ideas, documents and other materials to enable us to create the resources for safer NSAID prescribing.

In particular, we would like to acknowledge the significant contribution made by the following organisations (click here), who have shared materials and ideas from their own statin switching campaigns with us.