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A pioneering national programme that is improving the safety of medicines for people with a learning disability has been highly commended at the 2026 PrescQIPP Awards.
For the first time, local systems and national leaders can access consistent, population-level data showing the scale of antipsychotic prescribing in this patient group and use those insights to drive improvement.
The submission, led by partners from Health Innovation West Midlands, Health Innovation East Midlands, NHS England's Medicines Safety Improvement Team, the Clinical Digital Resource Collaborative (CDRC) and Patient Safety Collaboratives, showcases how data and digital innovation are helping reduce the risk of harm from antipsychotic medicines prescribed for behaviour that challenges.
The work forms part of the National Medicines Safety Improvement Programme (MedSIP), which aims to help people with a learning disability avoid harm associated with psychotropic medicines.
During the MedSIP national scoping phase, partners identified a critical gap. Despite longstanding national efforts to improve psychotropic prescribing, there was no accessible national dataset that could consistently measure antipsychotic prescribing for people with a learning disability who do not have severe mental illness, nor a reliable way to identify patients most at risk.
To address this challenge, the programme developed a suite of innovative tools and resources that are now being used across England.
The MedSIP brought together key stakeholders; NHS England's STOMP/STAMP programme, academic partners, the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Intellectual Disability Faculty and CDRC, to co-develop two novel national improvement metrics linked directly to measurable patient harm.
Alongside these metrics, partners created:
The innovations enable healthcare teams to identify patients who may benefit from medication review, understand prescribing variation, monitor improvement over time and support safer prescribing practices.
Delivering national impact
The programme has now completed its first year of delivery across England, supported by 15 Patient Safety Collaboratives and spanning 21 Integrated Care Boards
Early results demonstrate growing adoption and impact:
Supporting safer, more personalised care
The MedSIP enables stakeholders to think about complex medicines related challenges differently: to shift thinking away from a focus on medication review and isolated interventions towards an understanding of the contributing factors for success:
i.e a holistic, system-level approach.
By combining national data, local quality improvement methods and multidisciplinary working, MedSIP is helping reduce unwarranted variation in prescribing while supporting a more person-centred approach to care.
Importantly, all tools, searches and resources have been developed to be freely available and easily adopted by healthcare organisations, enabling systems across England to replicate the approach without additional cost.
Looking ahead
The programme will continue to collect and analyse data over the coming year, building the evidence base around safer antipsychotic prescribing and sharing learning nationally.
The PrescQIPP Highly Commended Award recognises not only the innovative use of data and technology, but also the collaborative effort that has brought together national, regional and local partners to address an important patient safety issue and improve outcomes for people with a learning disability.
Thank you to the people with learning disability, their families and carers who shared their experiences and trusted us with their stories - their voices are the catalyst for change and remain the reason this work matters.
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