Prudent Prescribing Workshops to support the Prudent Healthcare agenda in Wales in 2014-15

Introduction: Prudent healthcare has been defined as, “healthcare that fits the needs and circumstances of patients and actively avoids wasteful care that is not to the patients benefit”. As one of the steps in making prudent healthcare happen, the All Wales Therapeutics and Toxicology Centre (AWTTC) designed, developed and delivered a series of case-based prudent prescribing workshops in 2014-15 to provide opportunity for interactive discussion of clinical case scenarios illustrating aspects of local and national prescribing, relevant NICE ‘do not do’, and the STOPP/START criteria, the national prescribing indicators for Wales and AWMSG guidance on Polypharmacy for Frail Older Adults.

Methods: One slide-set of 10 case scenarios covered common therapeutic areas and another problematic polypharmacy. Workshop participants were encouraged to use the materials to cascade messages about prudent prescribing and polypharmacy to colleagues. Health Boards supported the workshops by arranging new protected time or offering existing planned CPD sessions.

Results: Sixteen workshops were arranged in venues across Wales involving more than 400 health professionals (general practitioners, pharmacists, nurses and hospital consultants) during the financial year 2014-15. The feedback is shown in figures 1 to 6 (see below), with a score(out of 10) for satisfaction/ quality on the abscissa and the number of responses for each score on the ordinate.

Fig.1. “The workshop improved my knowledge of the Prudent Healthcare agenda”

Fig.2. Quality of Workshop content

Fig.3. Quality of Workshop presentations

Fig.4. Relevance of materials

Fig.5. “I am likely to change some aspects of my practice after this workshop

Fig.6. “The information from the workshop will be useful to disseminate to my colleagues”

Conclusions: These case-based learning workshops using the “training the trainer” approach received high levels of participant satisfaction. Many respondents also agreed that the workshops hadimproved their knowledge of the Prudent Healthcare agenda, that the information supplied would be useful to disseminate to their colleagues and would also be likely to change some aspects of their own practice.