STAR-PU.
Age-and-sex weighted prescribing units for a specific therapeutic group, so practices with different populations can be compared fairly.
Specific Therapeutic group Age-sex Related Prescribing Units weight a practice's registered list by how heavily each age and sex band uses a particular group of medicines. Items per STAR-PU is how you compare antibiotic prescribing between a student-heavy city practice and a retirement-town one without the age mix drowning the signal.
The weights are specific to each therapeutic group, which is the point: the population that drives hypnotics is not the population that drives antibiotics. Use STAR-PUs for the groups they exist for, and ASTRO-PUs for prescribing overall.
ASTRO-PU · Age, sex and temporary resident originated prescribing units: the general-purpose weighting for comparing overall prescribing between practices.
Items (prescription items) · One item is one product on one prescription form, dispensed once. It is the unit of NHS prescribing volume, and it is not a patient.
See it on a real molecule.
Every molecule page uses this term somewhere: in the scorecard, the charts or the honesty strip. The definitions live here; the numbers live there.