National therapeutic indicators data visualisation
Data to June 2020

An Official Statistics publication for Scotland

Published: 20 October 2020
Type: Statistical report
Author: Public Health Scotland

Pharmacy and prescribing

About this release

The release by Public Health Scotland is a data visualisation of the 2018 to 2019 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 June 2020. This visualisation presents information by NHS board, Health and Social Partnership, General Practitioner (GP) practice, GP cluster and practice peer group.

Main points

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.

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.

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 is the fifth 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:

Triple Whammy Chart A trend chart showing the National Therapeutic Indicator for 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 — Image caption Acute Kidney Injury: number of people aged ≥65 years co-prescribed a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor/angiotensin receptor blocker and a diuretic as a percentage of all people aged ≥65 years prescribed an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor/angiotensin receptor blocker and a diuretic

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

Further information

The next release of this publication will be January 2021.

General enquiries

If you have an enquiry relating to this publication, please email phs.prescribing@phs.scot.

Media enquiries

If you have a media enquiry relating to this publication, please contact the Communications and Engagement team.

Requesting other formats and reporting issues

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Older versions of this publication

Versions of this publication released before 16 March 2020 may be found on the Data and Intelligence, Health Protection Scotland or Improving Health websites.