GPs have been over-prescribing expensive treatments instead of following NICE cost-effective guidelines, a new National Prescribing Centre (NCP) report says.

Findings show how GPs have issued expensive drugs instead of cheaper generic options, costing the NHS tens of millions of pounds each year.

Practitioners have now been advised to review and revise 15 therapeutic areas that adhere to current guidelines in a bid to help the NHS make £20bn in efficiency savings.

The Department of Health welcomed the findings but insisted they must be observed across the country should ‘significant’ savings be made.

The report found a number of expensive drugs had been overprescribed by GPs. Since NICE guidance was published in November 2007, the annual spend on cholesterol-lowering drug Ezetrol has increased from £48m to £68m.

Dr Neil Maskrey, Director of Evidence-Based Therapeutics at the NPC, said the report identified some “key therapeutic medicines management options” and would improve patient care in the future.

“Importantly, whilst the purpose of this piece of work was to identify topics that would increase the efficiency of primary care prescribing, the evidence base for all the topics identified has been carefully examined to ensure that safety and clinical effectiveness would be maintained, or in some cases even improved, if they were incorporated into prescribing practice with less variation than at present,” he said.

Peter Rowe, lead for the quality, innovation, productivity and prevention (QIPP) programme at the Department of Health, insisted that while changes to certain therapeutic areas would not be great the overall impact could generate huge savings.

“Some of the topics here improve quality but have little or no associated cost savings,” he said. “Others, when considered alone locally, can deliver relatively small cost savings, but when aggregated nationally and implemented with much less variation than currently, the savings become very significant.”