HC Deb 12 December 1989 vol 163 c616W
109. Mr. Sumberg

To ask the Secretary of State for Health what impact he expects the National Health Service reforms to have on the prescription of tranquillisers and other anxiety-reducing drugs by general medical practitioners.

Mrs. Virginia Bottomley

Indicative prescribing budgets will encourage GPs to examine critically all of their prescribing to ensure that it is clinically justified. GPs are already well aware of the need to prescribe tranquillisers with great care as demonstrated by the reduction in the number of prescriptions for benzodiazepines from 30.9 million in 1979 to 23.2 million in 1988 in Great Britain. We expect this trend to continue.