None listed
Conditions
Brief summary
This National Prescribing Service (NPS) project aims to improve GPs’ management of these patients through feedback on their own prescribing practices and small group discussions with peers and a trained group facilitator. Participating GPs can examine their prescribing practices using a “data extraction and reporting tool” provided by the researchers that interacts with the software GPs already use to manage patient records and write prescriptions. About twenty Divisions of General Practice will be recruited through expressions of interest and the chosen divisions will in turn recruit approximately 9 practices within their division to participate in the research. Participating practices will be randomly allocated to one of three groups of which two groups will be the intervention group and one group will be the control group. Practices assigned to the intervention group will receive the quality improvement intervention (data extraction tool and small group discussion) with each group undertaking the clinical topics hypertension and chronic heart failure ion the reverse order to the other. The control group will not receive any intervention for the first six months and will therefore act as a “true control” for the other two groups. Participating GP practices will receive continuing education credits and an average of $500 reimbursement for time spent on data cleaning. Non–identifiable patient and GP data before and after the intervention will be extracted and analysed by NPS.
Interventions
A general practice quality improvement intervention which includes: provision of evidence-based indicators to general practitioners (GPs) using their practice prescribing data, at each of the two peer group discussions (with general practitioners (GPs).These discussions are facilitated by a trained Division of General Practice facilitator, and last around 60 minutes. They are held at approximately at 1 month and 5 months after the data extraction during a six month topic block. Written resource
A general practice quality improvement intervention which includes: provision of evidence-based indicators to general practitioners (GPs) using their practice prescribing data, at each of the two peer group discussions (with general practitioners (GPs).These discussions are facilitated by a trained Division of General Practice facilitator, and last around 60 minutes. They are held at approximately at 1 month and 5 months after the data extraction during a six month topic block. Written resources are prvided for each topic. Professional development incentives are awarded to the GP when two clinical meetings for a topic are completed. This is equivalent to a clinical audit. This also contributes to QPI Practice Incentive Payments. The study will run for approximately 18 months.
Sponsors
National Prescribing Service Limited
Study design
Allocation
Randomised controlled trial
Intervention model
Other
Primary purpose
Educational / counselling / training
Masking
Open (masking not used)
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
Yes
Inclusion criteria
To be eligible for inclusion in the study GPs should: - Agree to participate in the study - Participate in activities to improve the data quality of their GP prescribing system ie small group discussions and patient audit and feedback - Make their data available for the evaluation Patient data will be included of they have hypertension or chronic heart failure or are taking the relevant medications
Exclusion criteria
If GPs are unwilling to participate in small group discussions If GPs are unwilling to make their data available for the evaluation
Outcome results
None listed