ABSTRACT
A great deal of effort is being made at the moment to find ways of measuring the quality of a practice's prescribing, but much of it is very unsatisfactory. This chapter deals with some of the issues involved and describes what real progress has been made. Each prescription is given to an individual patient: to judge its quality one would have to be sure that the diagnosis was correct and to know a great deal more about the patient. At the moment, prescribing is usually measured in terms of three rates, namely: the number of items per patient, the cost per item, and the cost per patient. The level of morbidity in a practice population must also influence prescribing, but there is no way of measuring it. Defined daily doses (DDDs) provide a better way of measuring volume than the number of items prescribed, because they are independent of prescription duration.
