Table 2

Summary of participants' thoughts on prescribing guidelines and patient-partnership approaches

	Prescribing guidelines	Patient–doctor partnership (shared decision making or partnership inmedicine taking)
Patients	Perceived guidelines as rules with no flexibility	Valued effective communication and being listened to
	Only aware of guidelines and targets indirectly	Not all patients wanted, or expected, to be involved in shared decision making
	Felt entitled to have medicines due to payment of tax and prescription charges

Target-driven GPs	Focused on targets and guidelines	Little interest in partnership

Pragmatic GPs	Interpreted guidelines flexibly in the context of individual patients	Strived to use a partnership approach and identified barriers to it
	Identified specific areas of tension between guidelines and aspects of concordance	Considered concordance to be information sharing, shared decision making, honesty about non-compliance
	Identified need to retain autonomy over prescribing decisions and to be involved in guideline development	Pragmatic about the achievability of the approach

Prescribing advisers	No flexibility in the policy	Little interest in partnership
		Seen as a means of encouraging cooperation with guidelines and preventing non-adherence