Zuclopenthixol acetate prescribing in primary care

Below are the database queries which are used to create this measure. These are run against a copy of the BSA prescribing data which we store in Google BigQuery. We're working on making our BigQuery tables publicly available at which point it will be possible to run and modify these queries yourself. But even where code and database queries are not directly useable by others we believe it is always preferable to make them public.

Description Number of items for zuclopenthixol acetate items as a proportion of all injectable zuclopenthixol items
Why it matters The BNF has a safety warning advising that zuclopenthixol acetate should only be used in hospitals as it is a relatively short-acting antipsychotic. Sometimes it may be confused with zuclopnethixol decanoate, a long-acting antipsychotic which is more commonly prescribed in primary care supporting long term maintenance.

Any prescribing on this measure could prompt investigation to ascertain if zuclopenthixol acetate was prescribed in error.

Please note that this is an experimental measure to support a new type of alert. We would be grateful for any feedback at [email protected] and you can read more about the measure on our blog.
Tags Mental Health, Safety
Implies cost savings No
Authored by brian.mackenna
Checked by richard.croker
Last reviewed 2019-10-09
Next review due 2020-10-09
Associated notebook https://github.com/ebmdatalab/jupyter-notebooks/tree/master/new_measures/Zuclopenthixol
History View change history on GitHub →

Numerator SQL

SELECT
     CAST(month AS DATE) AS month,
     practice AS practice_id,
     SUM(items) AS numerator
 FROM hscic.normalised_prescribing
 WHERE bnf_code IN ("040201010AAAAAA", "040201010BBAAAA")
 GROUP BY month, practice_id

Denominator SQL

SELECT
     CAST(month AS DATE) AS month,
     practice AS practice_id,
     SUM(items) AS denominator
 FROM hscic.normalised_prescribing
 WHERE bnf_code IN ("040201010AAAAAA", "040201010BBAAAA", "0402020Z0AAAAAA", "0402020Z0AAABAB", "0402020Z0BBAAAA", "0402020Z0BBACAB")
 GROUP BY month, practice_id
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