smarter medicine - Choosing Wisely Switzerland: benzodiazepines in Ticino public hospitals
Also: EOC benzodiazepine benchmarking
A public hospital network in Italian-speaking Switzerland joined smarter medicine and combined open prescription monitoring, between-hospital benchmarking and multidisciplinary education to cut new benzodiazepine and Z-drug prescriptions.
- Years
- 2016–now
- Country
- Switzerland
- Topic
- Low value carePatient safetySleep
- Asks people to
- Stop
- Strategy
- Simple instruction
- Channel
- Clinical setting
- Audience
- Cliniciansinternal medicine physicians
Evidence
Quasi-experimentalMixed
New benzodiazepine prescriptions fell from 7.2% to 5.5% of admissions (24% relative) while untreated surgery wards rose; between-hospital variation dropped 27%. A later 2024 analysis found new benzo/Z prescriptions fell about 0.2% a year but antipsychotic prescribing rose by a matching amount, suggesting substitution.
Sponsor (who paid)
- Ente Ospedaliero Cantonale (Ticino public hospital network) State local government
- smarter medicine - Choosing Wisely Switzerland NGO
Credits (who made it)
Not recorded yet.
Related campaigns
- Choosing Wisely 2012–2023
Sources
- Combining prescription monitoring, benchmarking, and educational interventions to reduce benzodiazepine prescriptions among internal medicine inpatients evaluation · 2018 · DOI 10.1080/00325481.2018.1504594 · PMID 30044682
- Peer-pressure and overuse: The effect of a multimodal approach on variation in benzodiazepine prescriptions in a network of public hospitals evaluation · 2019 · DOI 10.1111/ijcp.13448 · PMID 31750587
- Antipsychotic, benzodiazepine and Z-drug prescriptions in a Swiss hospital network in the Choosing Wisely and COVID-19 eras evaluation · 2024 · DOI 10.57187/s.3409 · PMID 39509532
Research notes
Created 2026-10-23 from the sleep campaign literature search (PubMed and web search; OpenAlex was unreachable), see docs/sleep-campaigns-literature.md. Findings are paraphrased from abstracts, not full texts; official URLs come from search results and were not opened. Network name inferred from Ticino affiliations; abstracts say 'network of Swiss public hospitals'.
Record cases/ch-smarter-medicine-benzodiazepines-ticino.json, updated 2026-10-23· Link to this campaign