Prescribing of Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapies (SACT) through Primary Care in England
Poster presented at British Oncology Pharmacy Association 2023, describing rates prescribing of anti-cacner medicines by primary care teams.
Chloe Waterson 
Calum Polwart
Oncology, Pharmacy, Data, Real-World Outcomes, Software, Open Source
This project started out as a simple exercise in playing with some data and showing a colleague how she might make use of R. I’d looked previously at some data on Open Prescribing regarding high dose dexamethasone which I felt had no place in primary care (or possibly anywhere!) I’ve written about that before on TheDataLab’s website. I initially suggested to Chloë that we might do an update of that data using Open Prescribing’s API. In fact, it turns out Dexamethasone 40mg Tablets have been discontinued. However, in that blog we discussed there were other “worrying” items being recorded as dispensed. Chloë felt it was worth a look and we went for a bit of dive into the data.
I’ve explained a bit more about the back story to the poster on this twitter thread:
Perhaps easiest read on TypeFully’s combined version.
Chloë’s poster was selected as a winning poster for BOPA 2023. Probably not too surprising when you consider she discovered about a million pounds of prescribing of cancer treatments that we didn’t expect.
PDF version of poster is available on Fig Share.
Chloë’s work also produced a list of cancer treatments that we felt were questionable for prescribing in primary care. The list is available on Open CodeList’s website if any other researchers wanted to re-use it. All Chloë’s code is available on GitHub too.
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Citation
@article{waterson2023,
author = {Waterson, Chloe and Polwart, Calum},
publisher = {Sage Journals},
title = {Prescribing of {Systemic} {Anti-Cancer} {Therapies} {(SACT)}
Through {Primary} {Care} in {England}},
journal = {Journal of Oncology Pharmacy Practice},
volume = {30},
number = {1\_suppl},
date = {2023-10-06},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1177/10781552241228011},
doi = {10.1177/10781552241228011},
issn = {1078-1552},
langid = {en}
}