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