National therapeutic indicators data visualisation
Data to December 2019

About this release

The release by Public Health Scotland is a data visualisation of the 2018/19 Prescribing National Therapeutic Indicators (NTIs). The NTIs are a set of prescribing indicators that are used for quality improvement work. The publication is an update of prescribing data analysis up to December 2019. This visualisation presents information by NHS Board, Health and Social Partnership, General Practitioner (GP) practice, GP cluster and practice peer group.

Further information

The data visualisation allows a more in depth and interactive visual analysis of the current National Therapeutic Indicators paper publication, published by the Effective Prescribing and Therapeutics Branch of the Scottish Government. The visualisation has a number of features, including a presentation of variation and prescribing trends, comparisons of Health and Social Care Partnerships, GP clusters and practice peer groups. For this update we have also provided a practice level dashboard showing comparisons between indicators, health and social care partnership trends and an NHS board indicator summary.

A number of interactive views are available that show:

• A dropdown menu of indicators by therapeutic area
• A summary page of indicators by GP practice and also by NHS board
• A view of each therapeutic indicator at a specific point in time
• The prescribing rate for each indicator over time, for Scotland, NHS Board and GP practice, by cluster, or by peer group
• A comparison of data at three different time points for NHS Boards, Health and Social Care Partnerships and GP Clusters
• This interactive visualisation allows the user to look at the variation in prescribing practice between GP practices and should be useful to both prescribers and associated prescribing staff who want an easy to access visualisation view of prescribing data
• This is the third release of the data visualisation as a beta release and further developments will follow, as prioritised by a steering group for this work
• An example of the visualisation is shown in the figure below:

Acute Kidney Injury: number of people aged ≥65 years co-prescribed a NSAID and an ACE inhibitor/angiotensin receptor blocker and a diuretic as a percentage of all people aged ≥65 years prescribed and ACE inhibitor /angiotensin receptor blocker and a diuretic

Further information is available from the prescribing webpages (external website).