Alternative Treatments to Selected Medications: 2023 AGS Beers Criteria
Our team wanted to share these valuable resources with you and encourage you to review them as part of supporting safe and effective prescribing practices in older adults within your organization.
The Beers Criteria: Supporting Safer Prescribing in Older Adults
The Beers Criteria is a well-known, critical tool for healthcare providers to identify potentially inappropriate medications for older adults. Medication safety is a common concern in our long-term care (LTC) facility population.
Referring to the Beers Criteria helps providers:
Reduce the risk of adverse drug events
Prevent polypharmacy complications
Lower the chance of hospital readmissions
Promote safer and more effective medication management
By incorporating the Beers Criteria into clinical decision-making, LTC teams can enhance patient safety, improve quality of life, and ensure prescribing practices are aligned with evidence-based geriatric care standards.
Resource: Safer Alternatives
Identifying medications to avoid is good, but it is also helpful to have resources regarding safer alternatives. The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) recently published a companion resource to the 2023 AGS Beers Criteria titled Alternative Treatments to Selected Medications in the 2023 American Geriatrics Society Beers Criteria.
This resource provides clinicians with practical guidance on:
Pharmacological alternatives
Non-pharmacological strategies
Together, these approaches help replace potentially inappropriate medications with safer, evidence-based options.
Example: Diabetes Management
Here is an example, for reference, that provides safe alternatives to the use of sliding scale insulin for the management of diabetes:
