Barriers and Facilitators to deprescribing in care homes
Research type
Research Study
Full title
An investigation into the barriers and facilitators to stopping inappropriate medicines (“deprescribing”) for older people living in care homes to inform the development of a novel intervention.
IRAS ID
215674
Contact name
Emma Bolton
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Leeds
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
n/a, n/a
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 8 months, 31 days
Research summary
There are approximately 405,000 people aged 65 years old or older living in over 17,000 care homes in the United Kingdom. Care home residents typically have multiple health conditions, and are prescribed an average of 8-10 medicines every day.
While taking lots of medicines can be safe and necessary, it can sometimes be a problem. As care home residents get older, the way medicines affect their body changes. They may be more affected by side effects, or medicines may contribute to them falling. Both of these can lead to hospital admissions and reduce quality of life.
Deprescribing has been defined as the process of identifying and withdrawing unnecessary medicines. There is evidence that prescribing for care home residents is often sub optimal and inappropriate, but there is not much evidence available explaining why this is the case.
To investigate why deprescribing is not often carried out for care home residents, and how people feel about stopping medicines in general, interviews will be carried out. The following people will be interviewed:
• Care home residents
• Relatives of care home residents
• General practitioners (GPs, family doctors)
• Care home staff
• Pharmacists.The information collected from the interviews will be used to develop an intervention to assist with the deprescribing process in care homes. This is a three year project.
N.B: The study will not include residents with dementia or other cognitive impairment, or anyone who is unable to give informed consent to take part.
REC name
Social Care REC
REC reference
17/IEC08/0017
Date of REC Opinion
19 Apr 2017
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion