The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) has backed a campaign to tackle unnecessary prescribing.

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AoMRC) – which includes the Royal College of General Practitioners - launched its Choose Wisely initiative earlier this month (May 13) to encourage doctors and patients to pick the correct treatment based on clinical evidence.

The AoMRC was setting up a steering group to oversee the project, and told C+D it would liaise with pharmacy groups to gather their “invaluable input”.
 
Royal Pharmaceutical Society science adviser Jayne Lawrence said the society “strongly supported” the initiative. “Unproven therapies are used every day, to the detriment of patient care and at cost to the NHS,” she told C+D on Tuesday (May 19).

“Only the process of rigorously testing treatments and collecting the resulting evidence moves medicine forward and improves patient care,” she added.

"Fatally flawed" without pharmacists

Contractor Sid Dajani warned that the campaign would be “fatally flawed” if it only focused on doctors and patients, because pharmacists were needed to help evaluate and explain which treatments were unnecessary.

“My experience is that some patients will go with what they know. When we take them off something they believe works and put them on something with a stronger evidence base, we need to educate the patient at the same time,” said Mr Dajani, who is also a member of the RPS's English Pharmacy Board.

The AoMRC said it was planning to ask each royal medical college to pick five treatments or tests this month which were of “questionable value”. It would then analyse and publish the results in the autumn ahead of a “major” public campaign to make doctors and patients aware of the list, it said.

This approach could reduce the cases of antibiotics being prescribed for viral infections or self-limiting conditions such as colds or flu, the AoMRC stressed.
 
The Choose Wisely initiative originated in the US and Canada, where it had helped clinicians identify “hundreds of treatments whose value should be questioned with patients”, the AoMRC said. The campaign had been imported to the UK in response to “extensive anecdotal evidence that clinical provision and patient expectation are increasing the demand for medical or surgical solutions”, it added.
 
Last month, C+D reported that pharmacists were divided over revelations that GPs prescribed hundreds of thousands of readily available items such as shampoo, sunscreen and vitamin products on the NHS last year. 

Which treatments do you think are prescribed unnecessarily?

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