Warning GPs on antibiotics is reducing prescriptions

WARNING family doctors that they are driving a ‘health catastrophe’ by doling out too many antibiotics helps reduce prescriptions, a study has found.

Professor Dame Sally Davies, England’s chief medical officer, wrote to GPs saying they were helping create a ‘serious and growing threat to health’ by giving out too many pills.

The pilot scheme was a success, she claimed last night, helping drive down prescriptions by 3.3 per cent and saving £92,000.

But the dangers of pressuring doctors over antibiotics were last month highlighted in an NHS report into the death of a one-year-old baby.

The report into the death of William Mead, who died of sepsis without receiving antibiotics, warned that GPs are under ‘constant pressure’ to reduce their prescriptions.

As a result, it found some GPs are refusing to hand them out even when

‘Constant pressure’

it is ‘clinically indicated’ – in other words, where the patient genuinely needs them.

The report said that the pressure not to prescribe antibiotics ‘might well have had an impact’ on the ‘decision-making’ of the doctors involved in William’s case.

Over six months in the winter of 2014/15, letters were sent to 750 practices across England who had antibiotic prescribing rates that were in the top 20 per cent for their area. The practice in Cornwall where William Mead died did not receive the letter.

Writing in the medical journal The Lancet yesterday, Dame Sally insisted: ‘This innovative trial has shown there are effective and low-cost ways to reduce the unnecessary prescribing of antibiotics.’ The article’s co-author Michael Hallsworth said: ‘This simple intervention could reduce England’s antibiotic prescribing by 0.85 per cent, despite costing just 6p per prescription saved.’