More effort required to achieve deprescribing in hospitals

Deprescribing is an important initiative to reduce the burden of potentially dangerous medications, and may be triggered in response to an adverse event, or initiated proactively if future advantages of treatment are unlikely to outweigh future harms. Exploring the details of prescribing and discontinuation medication that were present at the time of hospital admission were undertaken by a team of researchers in Britain, using data from a hospital’s electronic prescribing system extracted over a 4 week period, using a random sample of 200 discontinuations. 24,552 admission medicines were analysed, 977 discontinuations were recorded. Of the 200 discontinuations sampled for review, only 44 (22.0%) were confirmed deprescribing activities; 7 (15.9%) proactive and 37 (84.1%) reactive. These results suggest that only very limited deprescribing activity occurred, and was dominated by reactive behaviour. It would appear that far more active effort if required if hospital admissions are to be viewed as opportunities to initiate deprescribing activities. Read more about the study, published in the International Journal of Clinical Pharmacy.