Health: pharmaceutical spending in Puglia beyond all limits, new guidelines for doctors and local health authorities

The guidelines essentially consist of three points: the strengthening of the control of the Local Health Authorities; the definition of consumption parameters that allow for the elaboration of quarterly statistics, and finally the awareness and empowerment of general practitioners.

As for the study on the dynamics of pharmaceutical expenditure, a strong criticality emerges precisely with regard to prescriptive attitudes and "the presence of significant differentiations in the entity and profiles of consumption and pharmaceutical expenditure between the various Local Health Authorities and between the various municipal areas within of each Local Health Authority in the absence of analogous epidemiological differentiations".

The in-depth study conducted on prescriptions has highlighted that these differences "seem to depend on the different prescribing behaviors of doctors", while "the national benchmarks illustrated in the study demonstrate that more limited prescribing variability determines lower levels of pharmaceutical expenditure". As for the prevailing economic criticalities, the study reports, in the context of basic consumption, an excessive use of antibiotics in general and a high use of antibiotics in injection form” and “prevalent use of medicines for the treatment of hypertension.

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