Overview  

The Medicines in Acute and Chronic Care Driver Programme aims to make medicine use safer and more effective in both hospitals and chronic care settings.  

It focuses on understanding how medicines impact patients and health outcomes, with goals to reduce errors, minimise over-prescribing (using too many medications), reduce harms, identify drug-drug interactions, create adaptable guidelines for care, develop tools for personalised treatment decisions using data, and collaborate internationally to share best practices for safe and effective medicine use. 

Programme Co- Leads

Professor Elizabeth Sapey 

Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed 


“The programme is a real collaborative effort, bringing together experts from across the UK who will use patient data to shine a light on previously unknown adverse effects and drug interactions as well as identifying patients most at risk of negative outcomes associated with polypharmacy – taking lots of different medications. Rather than the research being conducted in a disease specific manner, it will cut across many conditions and give the big picture of how prescribing can have beneficial and negative consequences on health, as well as building tools to ensure medicines use is safer for patients.” 

Professor Elizabeth Sapey, Director of the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing at the University of Birmingham.

“It is wonderful to be part of the HDR UK family, and I am looking forward to interacting with colleagues.  I hope through a collaborative national effort, we can make a real impact on patients’ lives by improving the benefit-risk ratio of medicines.”  

Professor Munir Pirmohamed, David Weatherall Chair of Medicine at the University of Liverpool, Director of HDR UK North, and Honorary Consultant at Liverpool University Hospital Foundation NHS Trust

    • To understand the longitudinal determinants and consequences of appropriate and inappropriate polypharmacy 
    • To reduce medicines-related harm from individual medicines and drug-drug combinations, and enable safe de-prescribing 
    • To build treatment guidelines which reflect our changing demography and care needs, informed by real-world patient complexity in real time 
    • To move from the current paradigm of one-drug, one-dose fits all to more personalised treatment and preventive strategies 
    • To share methodologies, work and recommendations with teams across the globe 

Workstream: 

  1. Medicines Innovation  
  2. Data and Enabling Technologies  
  3. Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement  
  4. Capacity/Capacity Building  
  5. Communications and Stakeholder Engagement  
  6. Operational Delivery 

Activities: 

  • Develop an international framework for the identification of medicines related harm, including drug-drug interactions, from routinely collected health care data 
  • Prioritise the following activities across selected research projects 
  • Incorporation of key stakeholders and patients into project teams  
  • Enhancing data specifications and models  
  • Developing a metadata catalogue  
  • Creating automated tools for user testing  
  • To refine and enhance data specifications (including data model) for prioritised projects and data access processes/technologies. 
  • Co-develop a patient and public involvement and engagement strategy  
  • Co-develop public facing materials explaining polypharmacy, medicine-related harm, drug-drug interactions and how health data research can help  
  • Support training needs of fellows and students and identify opportunities for secondments and cross-site/discipline working, 
  • Gap analysis to identify needs for additional stakeholders to engage. 
  • Coordination of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), timelines, and deliverables 

Outputs