The impact of lidocaine plaster prescribing reduction strategies: A comparison of two national health services in Europe.

Molly Mattsson ORCID logo ; Fiona Boland ; Ciara Kirke ; Michelle Flood ; Emma Wallace ORCID logo ; Mary E Walsh ; Derek Corrigan ; Tom Fahey ; Richard Croker ; Sebastian CJ Bacon ; +5 more... Peter Inglesby ; David Evans ; Ben Goldacre ORCID logo ; Brian MacKenna ; Frank Moriarty ORCID logo ; (2023) The impact of lidocaine plaster prescribing reduction strategies: A comparison of two national health services in Europe. British journal of clinical pharmacology, 89 (8). pp. 2349-2358. ISSN 0306-5251 DOI: 10.1111/bcp.15779
Copy

AIMS: In 2017, two distinct interventions were implemented in Ireland and England to reduce prescribing of lidocaine medicated plasters. In Ireland, restrictions on reimbursement were introduced through implementation of an application system for reimbursement. In England, updated guidance on items which should not be routinely prescribed in primary care, including lidocaine plasters, was published. This study aims to compare how the interventions impacted prescribing of lidocaine plasters in these countries. METHODS: We conducted an interrupted time-series study using general practice data. For Ireland, monthly dispensing data (2015-2019) from the means-tested General Medical Services (GMS) scheme was used. For England, data covered all patients. Outcomes were the rate of dispensings, quantity and costs of lidocaine plasters, and we modelled level and trend changes from the first full month of the policy/guidance change. RESULTS: Ireland had higher rates of lidocaine dispensings compared to England throughout the study period; this was 15.22/1000 population immediately pre-intervention, and there was equivalent to a 97.2% immediate reduction following the intervention. In England, the immediate pre-intervention dispensing rate was 0.36/1000, with an immediate reduction of 0.0251/1000 (a 5.8% decrease), followed by a small but significant decrease in the monthly trend relative to the pre-intervention trend of 0.0057 per month. CONCLUSIONS: Among two different interventions aiming to decrease low-value lidocaine plaster prescribing, there was a substantially larger impact in Ireland of reimbursement restriction compared to issuing guidance in England. However, this is in the context of much higher baseline rates of use in Ireland compared to England.


picture_as_pdf
Mattsson-etal-2023-The-impact-of-lidocaine-plaster.pdf
subject
Published Version
Available under Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0

View Download

Atom BibTeX OpenURL ContextObject in Span Multiline CSV OpenURL ContextObject Dublin Core Dublin Core MPEG-21 DIDL Data Cite XML EndNote HTML Citation JSON MARC (ASCII) MARC (ISO 2709) METS MODS RDF+N3 RDF+N-Triples RDF+XML RIOXX2 XML Reference Manager Refer Simple Metadata ASCII Citation EP3 XML
Export

Downloads