ONS spend in Herts Valleys has been high and significant efforts, including the development of joint local guidance, have been made over a number of years to reduce this spend.
In 2018/19 revised and simplified prescribing guidance was introduced and shared widely which achieved a further reduction in oral nutritional supplement (ONS) spend.
So in 2019/20 we knew that achieving savings was going to be challenging. For this reason we focused on using newly available combined data to improve the quality of patient care.
From previous audit data, many patients taking ONS do not have a weight or BMI recorded in GP notes at prescription commencement, meaning that it is impossible to set or measure outcomes.
We worked with staff at Eclipse Live to set up a new & bespoke search for all adult ONS products, used in combination with data on BMI.
