Social norm feedback on benzodiazepine and Z-drug prescribing (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Outpatient practices that had issued benzodiazepine or Z-drug prescriptions beyond the 30-day guideline limit were sent feedback comparing their prescribing with peers.
- Years
- 2023
- Country
- Germany
- Topic
- Low value carePatient safetySleep
- Asks people to
- Stop
- Strategy
- Audit feedbackSocial norms
- Channel
- Direct mail
- Audience
- Cliniciansprimary care practices
Evidence
ExperimentalPositive
RCT of 1,258 practices: non-guideline DDDs fell 6.5% vs 3.0% in controls; share of patients with inappropriate prescriptions fell 20.2% vs 6.6%. Larger effect among practices below the 65th percentile at baseline.
Sponsor (who paid)
- Kassenärztliche Vereinigung Rheinland-Pfalz (KV RLP) State local government
- Study team (Wegwarth O et al.) Academic
Credits (who made it)
Not recorded yet.
Sources
- Non-Guideline-Compliant Prescriptions of Benzodiazepines and Z Drugs: Effects of Social Norm Feedback. A Randomized Controlled Trial evaluation · 2026 · DOI 10.3238/arztebl.m2026.0093 · PMID 42265987
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. KV RLP supplied the data; whether KV RLP or the researchers sent the letters is not stated in the abstract.
Record cases/de-benzodiazepine-prescriber-feedback.json, updated 2026-10-23· Link to this campaign