Identifying English Practices that Are High Antibiotic Prescribers Accounting for Comorbidities and Other Legitimate Medical Reasons for Variation.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Seeing one's practice as a high antibiotic prescriber compared to general practices with similar patient populations can be one of the best motivators for change. Current comparisons are based on age-sex weighting of the practice population for expected prescribing rates (STAR-PU). Here, we investigate whether there is a need to additionally account for further potentially legitimate medical reasons for higher antibiotic prescribing.

Methods

Publicly available data from 7376 general practices in England between April 2014 and March 2015 were used. We built two different negative binomial regression models to compare observed versus expected antibiotic dispensing levels per practice: one including comorbidities as covariates and another with the addition of smoking

SUBMITTER: Hope EC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6358038 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature