The Prescribing Observatory for Mental Health–UK (POMH-UK)

Corporate origins, affiliations, memberships

  • Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Research and Training Unit

  • Health Foundation

  • Rethink

  • MIND

  • RCN

  • BAP

  • RPSGB

  • CMHP

  • UKPPG
Objectives

To become the recognized disseminator of independent and high quality information about medicines practice in mental health.

To provide a central dynamic data collection system to manage information about prescribing and administering psychotropic medicine, in order to:

  • Identify and quantify  sub-optimal aspects of prescribing practice;

  • Compare and ‘benchmark’ prescribing practice across services and against ‘best practice’

  • Monitor change in the quality of prescribing practice over time and support measurement of the impact of interventions to improve quality;

  • Inform intervention development as well as act as an intervention itself – leading to measurable changes in prescribing practice.
Scope and focus of programme

Topic 1: Prescribing high dose and combined antipsychotics on adult acute and psychiatric intensive care (PICU) wards

Topic 2: Monitoring the physical health of assertive outreach team patients who are prescribed antipsychotics

Topic 3: Prescribing high dose and combination antipsychotics on forensic wards

Topic 4: Benchmarking anti-dementia prescribing

Topic 5: Benchmarking the prescribing of high dose and combination antipsychotics on adult acute and PICU wards

Topic 6: Assessment of side effects of psychotropic medication

Topic 7: Monitoring of patients prescribed lithium
Products and services

  • Members receive latest information about best prescribing practice, participate in e-discussion groups and receive other core information services.

  • Members have the option of participating in topic-based audits of various prescribing issues.

  • Members (Trusts) establish local leadership groups including a psychiatrist, a psychiatric pharmacist, a clinical governance lead, a senior nurse, and 2 service users to manage projects locally.

  • Data from audit topics are collected by participants and returned to the Observatory for analysis and report production.

  • Feedback events include action planning workshops for members to apply learning to service improvement.
Standards These will be available on the website in due course.
Web-site

http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/cru/pomh.htm
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