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The benefits of this project
Benefits for Your Patients
- Improved safety through reduced use of empty inhalers.
- Enhanced patient education and self-management.
Benefits for Your Practice
- Decreased risk of undertreatment.
- Reduces preventable appointments and prescribing workload
Benefits for The Planet
- Supports environmentally responsible healthcare practices.
Opportunity for improvement
- You might like to make a SMART goal for this project, e.g. by next month, add ‘Check Inhaler Empty?’ prompts to all asthma/COPD medication review templates
How to carry out this project
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Patient Search
Create a list of all patients with inhalers on repeat prescriptions.
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Send information to patients
Send information to patients about how to tell if their inhaler is empty.
Resource: Example text message
Do you know how to tell if your inhaler is empty? Ask your pharmacist or check here for more info: https://greeninhaler.org/telling-if-your-inhaler-is-empty/
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Educate the team
Do the other clinicians in your team know how to tell if inhalers are empty? Could you arrange a brief update, perhaps at a clinical meeting or by sending an email.
Prescribing inhalers with dose counters reduces the risk of patients using empty inhalers or disposing of them early. You can check if an inhaler has a dose counter here https://www.rightbreathe.com/?s.
PrescQIPP have information leaflets and banners you can add to websites about this (section called patient information materials).
Resource: PrescQIPP
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Study
Review the results, summarise learning, share with practice team and decide if any changes are needed to improve the process.
Decide when to re-audit again to ensure the change has lasted e.g. 2-3 months and use the Project Monitoring form to keep track.
Many practices run automatic searches at regular intervals – speak to your practice team about including this project in those searches.
Top tip
What still needs doing: opportunities for improvement, top tips, case study
How to scale this project up or down
| Please note - Use of this project requires NetworkPLUS membership. If you would like to share this project with others, please invite them to purchase their own membership—access must not be shared with non-members. |
You could upscale this project by working with your local ICB (England), Health Board (Scotland & Wales) or SPPG Pharmacy Advisor (Northern Ireland) to ensure once daily or alternate day dosing is the default pick in local formularies.
Have you completed this QIP?
Tell us a little about your project and enter your data in order to generate a certificate showing the probable cost savings and other benefits. This project may help with CQC evidence submission (see disclaimers).
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