STOMP during COVID-19: use of psychotropic medication in intellectual disabilities community services – pilot QI project
Advances in Mental Health and Intellectual Disabilities
ISSN: 2044-1282
Article publication date: 16 April 2024
Abstract
Purpose
A quantitative observational study was conducted. The purpose of this study is to examine the continuing adherence to the stopping over-medication of people with intellectual disability and/or autism guidelines for a cohort of outpatients seen in the outpatients’ clinics in the two teams who participated in this study to review the trend of psychotropic prescribing with a prescription indication along with the utilisation of non-pharmacological interventions.
Design/methodology/approach
Data was retrospectively collected over a period of one year for patients sampled conveniently in the outpatient’s clinic. The data was collected from two sites from psychiatric letters to the general practitioners (GPs), with the focus being psychotropic prescription indication and their adherence to British National Formulary limits, inclusion of a wider multi-disciplinary team or MDT (including nurses, psychologists and health support workers), use of Clinical Global Impression (CGI) scale for assessing medication side effects and response to treatment.
Findings
Most of the patients had at least one review in the previous six months. Antipsychotics were the highest prescribed medications without an indication for their use (13.3%) followed by anxiolytics and other medications. CGI recording was suboptimal, with 26% of the patient population did not have medication side effects and effectiveness monitored through this method. In total, 41% of patients were open to community nurses followed by other disciplines.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is an original article following the pilot study completed by the authors.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Conflict of interests: Authors disclose no conflict of interests.
Authors’ contributions: BR, SZ, HS, AR, RP and RL led the data collection/analysis, drafted the paper and made revisions on successive drafts.
Data availability: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [SZ], upon request.
Ethics statement: As this was a service evaluation there was no requirement for ethical approval.
Clinical trials registration: number N/A.
Consent statement: N/A.
Funding: No funding was sought for this project.
Citation
Zahid, S., Rauf, B., Lee, R., Sheikh, H., Roy, A. and Pathania, R. (2024), "STOMP during COVID-19: use of psychotropic medication in intellectual disabilities community services – pilot QI project", Advances in Mental Health and Intellectual Disabilities, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/AMHID-08-2023-0029
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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