Trends in medication use at the onset of and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Republic of Ireland: An interrupted time series study.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a substantial impact on healthcare delivery, particularly in general practice. This study aimed to evaluate how dispensing of medications in primary care in Ireland changed following the COVID-19 pandemic's onset compared to expected trends. This interrupted time series study used data on medications prescribed in general practice 2016-2022 to patient eligible for state health cover, approximately one third of the population.

Analysis of primary care prescription trends in England during the COVID-19 pandemic compared against a predictive model.

Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact across primary care. Primary care services have seen an upheaval, and more and more patients are engaging in telephone consultations in order to maintain social distancing. In the present study, we seek to quantify the effect of the pandemic on primary care prescribing.

GP prescribing in Northern Ireland by deprivation index: retrospective analysis.

Objective: In the present study, we sought to explore the relationship between socioeconomic status and prescribing magnitude and cost in primary care throughout Northern Ireland.

Design: We performed a retrospective data analysis of general practitioner (GP) prescribing using open-source databases with data collected from May to October 2019 to determine the number of prescriptions and cost of drugs and drug classes by area, ranking these by deprivation index. We used Kendall's tau to quantify the relationship between prescribing and deprivation.