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Medicines optimisation and pharmaceutical care
Prescribing Optimisation
The main aims of this research are:
• To investigate ways to improve prescribing in older adults (aged ≥65 years), where our research group has played a fundamental role in developing the STOPP/START criteria.
• To demonstrate the impact of pharmacist interventions in chronic disease management and in the geriatric oncology setting.
• To identify barriers and facilitators to prescribing optimisation (e.g. deprescribing) and to develop pharmacist-led behaviour change interventions.
• To develop and enhance antimicrobial stewardship initiatives in clinical and teaching settings.
Advancing Pharmacy Practice
The main aims of this research are:
• To investigate the expanding scope of pharmacists outside ‘traditional’ roles and healthcare settings (e.g. in intermediate care and general practice settings).
• To identify new ways of advancing pharmacy practice and the credentialing mechanisms to recognise this.
• To evaluate the impact that advanced pharmacy practitioners are having on the delivery of multidisciplinary team care, patient outcomes, and healthcare utilisation.
• To explore key stakeholders’ views on these advanced practices, such as pharmacist prescribing, and how these affect the quality of patient care.
Enhancing Patients' Use of Medicines
The main aim of this research area is to identify and eliminate barriers to appropriate medication use by patients. This may be achieved by empowering patients to maximise self-management of their medications and also by working together with multidisciplinary team to increase knowledge and awareness of suboptimal oral medication manipulation (e.g. the crushing of tablets).
Medication Safety
The main aims of this research are:
• To evaluate pharmacist interventions at hospital discharge to improve patient safety, such as discharge medication counselling using teach-back.
• To work with multidisciplinary team members and evaluate the discharge from a post-stroke unit, with a focus on examining any medication errors and how these could be ameliorated.
• To explore stakeholders’ views on prescribing at hospital discharge, with a focus on developing behaviour change interventions to improve this process.
Clinical Pharmacokinetics
Sometimes, patients do not respond to medicines as we expect - they may have a lower or higher concentration of drug in a particular target organ or have an effect with is not expected or unintended. Therefore, the main aim of this research is to identify possible reasons for these issues, using modelling, simulation and clinical data, and propose evidence-based solutions to improve patient care.
Vaccination
We have designed a novel series of compounds alpha-CNPs which are potent inhibitors of HIV RT and a number of other viral polymerases. Significantly these compounds display an entirely novel mode of action. They are the first nucleoside phosphonates to display direct inhibition of HIV RT without requiring prior phosphorylation. Evaluation of these compounds is undertaken in collaboration with researchers in Belgium, Germany, US and Canada. Parallel work is also on-going into novel phosphorus-sulfur based inhibitors of RT.
