Medicines optimisation and health outcomes in care home residents

Applications are invited for a full-time three-year PhD studentship (commencing October 2016/January 2017) funded by the Cardiff School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Invatech Health. The studentship will focus on understanding the challenges for the safe and effective medicines prescribing and administration practices in UK Care Homes.

Background:
In the UK, there are approximately 430,000 older people currently living in care homes. Residents of care homes represent a particularly vulnerable group. Prescribing for this group is complex with polypharmacy (individuals receiving more than four medicines) a consistent feature for care home residents. Efforts have been made to identify ways to improve the prescribing and medicines administration practices in the care home setting although these studies remain nascent in character; this in part due to the inability to accurately determine prescribing and administration practices at a sufficiently robust scale.

This current project will utilise a UK database of electronic medical records for care home residents to explore and link prescribing and administration practices in Care Homes, and at a scale that effectively establishes the potential impact of inappropriate practices upon resident health outcomes.

The following research outcomes will be addressed:
1. Develop explicit, evidence-based criteria relevant to care home residents that allows assessment of the quality of prescribing and administration practices. This will build on established tools and develop new criteria for drug classes that have not been studied.
2. Using real-time electronically captured data, assess the prevalence and types of prescribing and administration errors against criteria developed in 1. above.
3. Perform severity analysis of errors identified in 2. above to measure potential impact on patient outcomes.