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The trial included patients from 150 primary-care practices in the UK who were taking oral antidepressants (citalopram, fluoxetine, mirtazapine or sertraline) for at least 9 months and were well enough to consider stopping medication. Discontinuation of antidepressants is unlikely to be cost effective compared with maintenance, according to a cost-utility analysis (CUA) based on a randomised controlled trial conducted in the UK. [Extracted from the article]

The findings were robust to changes in a range of input parameters; however, "the probability that user testing is cost-effective and cost-saving is reduced for lower risk medicines, but is still 71% and 80% (respectively), as user-testing is a low-cost intervention" point out the authors. User-testing injectable medicines guidelines for nurses appears to reduce the number of medication errors when giving intravenous medicines to hospitalised patients, and therefore "the cost of the user-testing process is likely to be outweighed by the increased health of patients and reduced health service costs for treating the harm caused by medication errors", say the UK-based authors of a study published in I Applied Health Economics and Health Policy i . [Extracted from the article]