Understanding and enhancing medicines management resilience in home-dwelling older people living with frailty.
Description: For older people living at home, managing medicines can be complicated and challenging. They need to organise supplies, cope with changes to their medicine and routines, and take action when they think there have been mistakes or when they feel unwell. Poorly managed medicines may result in falls and being admitted to hospital which could lead to reduced activity and the ability to lead a normal life. Aim To work with older people and their carers to understand: The routines that people use to help them manage their medicines. How they might recognise when they need help or if their health is getting worse. And together develop skills and tools to self-manage medicines and access help from healthcare professionals when it is needed. Our work understand the positive steps people can take to stay safe. We hope that this will reduce harm from medicines and help people stay well. Our focus will be on people who are mildly or moderately frail which means they are at risk of falls, needing to go into hospital or into long-term care. Patient and public involvement Our patient team member has guided and reviewed our plans. We ran a workshop with patients and carers to inform our ideas and spoke with a patient panel. They told us that many older people work hard to manage their medicines safely at home and the work they do should be shared with others so that they can learn from it. We will also set up a patient group to guide this research. What we will do • We will interview 32 older people and their carers to find out about how they manage medicines, how they get help, their strategies and routines, and what they are able to do to overcome problems. We will invite them via their GP practice. We will also interview 16 healthcare professionals in primary and community care to understand how they support patients. • We will then work with groups of patients, carers and healthcare staff in workshops to create tools that patients and their carers can use to manage medicines. We will aim to have 4 patients / carers and two staff members in each workshops and run at least two workshops in each of four areas. • We will ask patients, carers and healthcare staff to assess what has been developed and to see if others would benefit. We will do this by running two focus groups with patients and two with staff members. Dissemination We will present our results to patients, carers and healthcare staff at events and conferences. We will write articles for journals and also for patients and members of the public.
Amount: £156,300
Funding type: research
Funder scheme: Research for Patient Benefit
Start date: 2021-04-06
End date: 2023-04-05
Investigator: Beth Fylan
Institution: BRADFORD TEACHING HOSPITALS NHS FOUNDATION TRUST
Funded outputs count: 3
Funder award ID: NIHR201056
OpenAlex ID: G5237233225