CloseHER2 Home (2019)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
CloseHER2 Home
IRAS ID
269056
Contact name
Andrew Radley
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Dundee
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 0 days
Research summary
Improvements in treatment and an ageing population means there are more and more people living with cancer. The number of people diagnosed with cancer is expected to be around a million every 10 years. The NHS needs to adapt to treat the rising numbers of patients with cancer.
One way to do this is by using community pharmacists who are highly trained healthcare professionals and are usually based closer to where a patient lives or works than a cancer centre hospital. Some Pharmacists already administer injectable medicines such as flu and travel vaccines. We want to see if Pharmacists can also administer a breast cancer treatment called trastuzumab.
Trastuzumab is an injection given over 5 minutes under the skin for the treatment of an aggressive form of breast cancer known as HER2 positive breast cancer. It is given every 3 weeks for at least a year in early breast cancer, and longer in patients with advanced disease.
We would like to ask 50 patients, who have been prescribed trastuzumab by their oncologist, to have four doses in a community pharmacy administered by the Pharmacist. We will check that it is safe to use community pharmacies to provide this service using the same criteria as NHS site and homecare porviders. We will also ask patients and staff what they think was good, and what needs to be improved.
Finally, we will work out how long each pathway takes for patients and staff and use compare the costs of a community pharmacy service to the hospital pathway.
REC name
East of Scotland Research Ethics Service REC 2
REC reference
19/ES/0143
Date of REC Opinion
3 Feb 2020
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion