Medications and prescriptions are an important part of the healthcare system, especially for general practitioners (GPs). GPs provide overall management of medications for their patients. Medications are often started by specialists in hospitals, so GPs may be co-ordinating prescribing from many healthcare providers to ensure appropriate care. Many factors have to be considered when deciding if a medication is appropriate, what it is for, dosage, frequency, side effects, drug interactions with other drugs or food, etc. Generally doctors can develop expertise in only a certain number of drugs and this can be challenging for GPs since they have to prescribe a wide variety of medications. Therefore using only a specific number of core drugs which they are experts in may result in high quality of drug prescribing and more appropriate care. DU90% is an indicator of prescribing quality, which is the number of medications that make up most (90%) of a doctor’s prescribing. It has been used in countries such as Sweden to give feedback to GPs on their prescribing patterns. In this research, we will be applying the DU90% to data on prescriptions from 2013 to 2017 across approximately 7000 GP practices in England. We will examine what medications make up the DU90%, if the DU90% has changed over time, and if some GP practices have much higher or lower DU90% than other practices.
