ArticleBMJ open2018
Impact of abolishing prescription fees in Scotland on hospital admissions and prescribed medicines: an interrupted time series evaluation.
Article in BMJ open, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Impact of removing prescription co-payments on the use of costly health services: a pragmatic randomised controlled trial.BMC health services research · 2023Trial
- Designing health care inclusively for people with low incomes: A policy-focused evidence brief.Public health in practice (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- Health insurance and antibiotic prescription in pharyngitis: a cross-sectional study in Saudi Arabian primary healthcare centers.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Article
- Association of Neighbourhood Deprivation with Secondary Prevention Prescribing and All-Cause Mortality among Stroke Patients in Scotland: A Population-Based Study.Cerebrovascular diseases (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Observational
- Lived experience of affordability as a barrier to prescription medicines: A longitudinal qualitative study.Exploratory research in clinical and social pharmacy · 2025Article
- Article
- Viewpoint on Time Series and Interrupted Time Series Optimum Modeling for Predicting Arthritic Disease Outcomes.Current rheumatology reports · 2020Review
- The impact of prescription drug co-payments for publicly insured families.The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care · 2020Article
- Improving prescribing through big data approaches-Ten years of the Scottish Prescribing Information System.British journal of clinical pharmacology · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesTo identify whether the abolition of prescription fees in Scotland resulted in: (1) Increase in the number (cost to NHS) of medicines prescribed for which there had been a fee (inhaled corticosteroids). (2) Reduction in hospital admissions for conditions related to those medications for which there had been a fee (asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD))-when both are compared with prescribed medicines and admissions for a condition (diabetes mellitus) for which prescriptions were historically free.
designNatural experimental retrospective general practice level interrupted time series (ITS) analysis using administrative data.
settingGeneral practices, Scotland, UK.
participants732 (73.6%) general practices across Scotland with valid dispensed medicines and hospital admissions data during the study period (July 2005-December 2013).
interventionReduction in fees per dispensed item from April 2008 leading to the abolition of the fee in April 2011, resulting in universal free prescriptions. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOMES: Hospital admissions recorded in the Scottish Morbidity Record - 01 Inpatient (SMR01) and dispensed medicines recorded in the Prescribing Information System (PIS).
resultsThe ITS analysis identified marked step reductions in adult (19-59 years) admissions related to asthma or COPD (the intervention group), compared with older or young people with the same conditions or adults with diabetes mellitus (the counterfactual groups). The prescription findings were less coherent and subsequent sensitivity analyses found that both the admissions and prescriptions data were highly variable above the annual or seasonal level, limiting the ability to interpret the findings of the ITS analysis.
conclusionsThis study did not find sufficient evidence that universal free prescriptions was a demonstrably effective or ineffective policy, in terms of reducing hospital admissions or reducing socioeconomic inequality in hospital admissions, in the context of a universal, publicly administered medical care system, the National Health Service of Scotland.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.