Better prescribing for safer, more effective healthcare

Written prescriptions for medicinal products can be traced back over 4000 years.1 Little is known about the clinical efficacy or patient acceptability of formulations in use at that time, but it is thought that prescriptions were recorded on clay tablets, and included details of the condition, the formulation of plant and animal products, and dosing instructions.Prescribing continues to be one of the most fundamental parts of medicine and one of the most common interventions in health care. In the UK, the British National Formulary lists more than 1600 drugs, which range from simple chemical substances that have been available for decades to new, small, interfering RNA molecules and products containing enzymes produced by recombinant DNA technology.2 The number of prescriptions dispensed in the community in England grew by 66% from 686 million prescriptions in 2004 to 1.14 billion prescriptions in 2021-22.34 Polypharmacy has also increased, with around 15% of people…
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