STOPPED: Your views (patients and informal caregivers)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
STOpping Potentially Problematic mEDicines (STOPPED): Your views (patients and informal caregivers)
IRAS ID
233959
Contact name
Sion Scott
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of East Anglia
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 11 months, 28 days
Research summary
The aim of this study is to determine how amenable older patients and informal caregivers (such as a family member) are to deprescribing (stopping inappropriate medicines) during an admission to hospital. Better healthcare and living conditions have led to people living longer, with a large proportion of the population living beyond 80 years old. This has led to more people developing long-term health conditions like high blood pressure, which often leads to receipt of prescription medicines. People developing a number of long term conditions, often older people, can therefore end up receiving a large number of prescribed medicines.
Most medicines have benefits and problems and the balance between these can change over a person’s lifetime. This can lead to older people taking medicines which offer more risks than benefits, referred to here as 'potentially problematic medicines'. Potentially problematic medicines are more likely to cause side effects, unnecessary hospital admissions and impaired quality of life. Researchers and healthcare professionals are exploring how best to identify and stop potentially problematic medicines in order to avoid the negative consequences. An admission to hospital, where specialist healthcare professionals are present and medication histories and routine monitoring of patients are undertaken has been suggested as a potential opportunity to identify and stop potentially problematic medicines.
Before stopping potentially problematic medicines in hospital, patients and where appropriate informal caregivers (such as a family member) should be involved in determining whether this is an appropriate setting to undertake the activity. This study will recruit older people and informal caregivers from Older People's Medicine wards and ask them to complete a validated questionnaire asking about their view's on stopping potentially problematic medicines.
REC name
North West - Greater Manchester West Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/NW/0582
Date of REC Opinion
10 Oct 2017
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion