Repeat Prescribing Minimum Standards for Opioids

Repeat Prescribing Minimum Standards for Opioids

A small working group consisting of representatives from across the Lincolnshire system, worked in collaboration with the Medicines Safety Lead Pharmacist from Health Innovations Network East Midlands, to co-produce the Lincolnshire Repeat Prescribing Minimum Standards for Opioids - a safe process for managing and issuing opioids, as per the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) and Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Repeat Prescribing Toolkit that was published in October 2024.

Whilst the national recommendation is to avoid putting opioids on repeat, this may be impractical for many practices due to the numbers of patients. As opioids are high-risk medications, a robust process is needed to safely manage repeat prescribing. These Repeat Prescribing Standards for Opioids will support general practices to create a local procedure that works for their situation and population, with the aim of improving opioid stewardship.

These are a ‘minimum’. As a minimum this is what we have set to ensure safety around opioids prescribing. We acknowledge that some practices will have far more advanced systems and processes in place for repeat opioid prescribing, which is brilliant. But for those that don’t, our document will support them to prescribe safely. The document is intended to be adapted locally (shown in italics on the flow chart) for those practices that wish to use it.