ArticleTrials2022
Using text and charts to provide social norm feedback to general practices with high overall and high broad-spectrum antibiotic prescribing: a series of national randomised controlled trials.
Article in Trials, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT03862794 (A Randomized Controlled Trial of Behaviourally Informed Feedback Letters Sent by the Chief Medical Officer on the Amount of Antibiotics and the Percentage of Broad Spectrum Antibiotics Prescribed in Primary Care), which is not on this map. Cited by 4 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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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.
A Randomized Controlled Trial of Behaviourally Informed Feedback Letters Sent by the Chief Medical Officer on the Amount of Antibiotics and the Percentage of Broad Spectrum Antibiotics Prescribed in Primary Care
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effectiveness of social norms messaging approaches for improving health behaviours in developed countries.Nature human behaviour · 2025Pooled it
- Audit and feedback: effects on professional practice.The Cochrane database of systematic reviews · 2025Pooled it
- Audit and Feedback Interventions for Antibiotic Prescribing in Primary Care: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2025Pooled it
- Setting targets for antibiotic use in general practice in Europe: A scoping review.The European journal of general practice · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundSending a social norms feedback letter to general practitioners who are high prescribers of antibiotics has been shown to reduce antibiotic prescribing. The 2017-9 Quality Premium for primary care in England sets a target for broad-spectrum prescribing, which should be at or below 10% of total antibiotic prescribing. We tested a social norm feedback letter that targeted broad-spectrum prescribing and the addition of a chart to a text-only letter that targeted overall prescribing.
methodsWe conducted three 2-armed randomised controlled trials, on different groups of practices: Trial A compared a broad-spectrum message and chart to the standard-practice overall prescribing letter (practices whose percentage of broad-spectrum prescribing was above 10% and who had relatively high overall prescribing). Trial C compared a broad-spectrum message and a chart to a no-letter control (practices whose percentage of broad-spectrum prescribing was above 10% and who had relatively moderate overall prescribing). Trial B compared an overall-prescribing message with a chart to the standard practice overall letter (practices whose percentage of broad-spectrum prescribing was below 10% but who had relatively high overall prescribing). Letters were posted to general practitioners, timed to be received on 1 November 2018. The primary outcomes were practices' percentage of broad-spectrum prescribing (trials A and C) and overall antibiotic prescribing (trial B) each month from November 2018 to April 2019 (all weighted by the number and characteristics of patients registered in the practice).
resultsWe randomly assigned 1909 practices; 58 closed or merged during the trial, leaving 1851 practices: 385 in trial A, 674 in trial C, and 792 in trial B. AR(1) models showed that there were no statistically significant differences in our primary outcome measures: trial A β = - .199, p = .13; trial C β = .006, p = .95; trial B β = - .0021, p = .81. In all three trials, there were statistically significant time trends, showing that overall antibiotic prescribing and total broad-spectrum prescribing were decreasing.
conclusionOur broad-spectrum feedback letters had no effect on broad-spectrum prescribing; adding a bar chart to a text-only letter had no effect on overall antibiotic prescribing. Broad-spectrum and overall prescribing were both decreasing over time.
trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT03862794. March 5, 2019.
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