Low Value Prescribing - a dashboard on OpenPrescribing
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NHS England has recently published priorities and planning guidance for 2025/26. A key part of this is a renewed focus on implementing ‘Low value prescribing’ guidance. You may also have heard this called ‘Low value medicines’ or by its full official name of ‘Items which should not routinely be prescribed in primary care’.
At OpenPrescribing, we provide every single practice, PCN, ICB and NHS England region with relevant measures to support the identification of low value prescribing. In this blog we describe how to access and use these measures.
To access the dashboard, go to your practice, PCN, ICB or NHS England region homepage, and under the section titled ‘NHS low priority measures’ click ‘view the 24 measures’.
As always, by default the measures are sorted with the greatest potential for improvement first, according to your ranking amongst other organisations. To identify the greatest potential for improvements in cost, choose the ‘Potential savings’ sorting option. You can read more about grouping measures in our previous blog or view our YouTube explainer video.
What is included on the dashboard?
We have measures for all of the items listed within NHS Englands’ Low Value Prescribing guidance, including:
- Aliskiren
- Amiodarone
- Bath and shower preparations
- Co-proxamol
- Dosulepin
- Doxazosin
- Dronedarone
- Immediate release fentanyl
- Glucosamine and chondroitin
- Herbal medicines
- Homeopathy
- Lidocaine plasters
- Liothyronine
- Lutein and antioxidants
- Minocycline
- Needles for insulin pens (where high cost)
- Omega-3 fatty acid compounds
- Oxycodone and naloxone combinations
- Paracetamol and tramadol combinations
- Perindopril arginine
- Rubefacients
- Silk garments
- Travel vaccines
- Trimipramine
We also have a measure that aggregates all of the above items into a single overall measure.
What next?
We are constantly looking for any updates to guidance, and if any additions or changes are made to the list of medicines in Low Value Prescribing guidance, we will promptly reflect these changes in our OpenPrescribing dashboard.
As a small team of clinicians, academics, and software engineers, we are able to build and launch dashboards quickly by working in an agile manner, openly describing our methods and code. If you have any suggestions for further developments of our Low Value Prescribing dashboard please get in touch at bennett@phc.ox.ac.uk