Professor Bruce Guthrie
Professor of General Practice, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine at Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh
Bruce Guthrie is a health services researcher using mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to understand and improve the quality and safety of healthcare. His research is focused on multimorbidity, polypharmacy and prescribing quality and safety. He leads a series of projects in this field, and collaborates with colleagues in the UK and internationally. To ensure implementation of research findings in the NHS, he has served on a number of national committees including chairing the Guideline Development Group for the NICE Multimorbidity clinical guideline, and being a member of the NICE Quality and Outcome Framework Indicators Advisory Group which defined national primary care quality indicators (including chairing the Thresholds, Retirement and Review Sub-Group) and the NHS Scotland Polypharmacy Working Group). His research spans the range from basic epidemiology and qualitative research, through pragmatic randomised trials of organisational interventions, to applied work with the NHS to translate research findings into real-world improvements in the quality and safety of healthcare. As an example, in prescribing safety he has led (1) Epidemiological and qualitative basic research to define problems and potential interventions; (2) Published the results of two trials involving one third of Scottish practices with two other trials involving 262 and 380 Scottish practices recently completed. The evaluated interventions are all built around informatics tools to make better use of routine clinical data, implemented alongside other elements including education and training, financial incentives and organisational change; (3) Worked with the NHS on implementation and evaluation including supporting building safety measures into Scottish Government National Therapeutic Indicators, helping develop national polypharmacy guidance, and co-designing a polypharmacy informatics tool with NHS colleagues where the impact of national implementation will be robustly evaluated using interrupted time series analysis. He continues to work clinically as a general practitioner.