An Intervention to Reduce Inappropriate Prescriptions of Antibiotics for Respiratory Infections in General Practice

Educational outreach visits to the CME-groups, work-shops, audit and feedback

The 433 recruited GPs had a total of 1336 717 office consultations of which 171 679 (12.8%) were RTIs encounters for 118 621 different patients. The GPs participated in peer continuing medical education (CME) groups in southern Norway. A multifaceted intervention was tailored, where key components were educational outreach visits to the CME-groups, work-shops, audit and feedback. Prescription Peer Academic Detailers conducted the educational outreach visits. During these visits, evidence-based recommendations of antibiotic prescriptions for RTIs were presented and software handed out for installation in participants PCs, enabling collection of prescription data. These data was linked to corresponding data from the Norwegian Prescription Database (NorPD). Main outcomes are baseline proportion of inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions for RTIs and change in prescription patterns compared to baseline one year after the initiation of the tailored pedagogic intervention.