SCRIPT e-Learning Programme
Research Themes
- Paediatric medicines use
- Barriers to novel medicines development (in paediatrics)
- Predicting and evaluating medicines adherence
- Risk in pharmaceutical systems
- Optimisation of antibiotics use
- Toolkits to optimise prescribing
Research Activity
Effective medicines use in children. An MCRN supported theme is determining and evaluating the issues involved with administering medicines to children with an intention to inform targeted formulations research.
Facilitation of drug clinical trials in paediatrics. Parallel investigations are examining the barriers to children participating in clinical drug trials.
Evaluating latent risks in paediatric pharmacy. This theme is reviewing existing risk assessment methods and approaches deployed in paediatric clinical pharmacy in a range of settings including high and low risk areas in specialist paediatric hospitals and in paediatric wards in general hospitals. It is intended to determine latent risks in these systems and examine the barriers that have been implemented to prevent these risks from occurring and then identify gaps, if any, in these systems.
Paediatric Medicines Management across the hospital-primary care interface. The nature and types of interaction between an NHS specialist paediatric care healthcare provider and the processes and systems involved in managing medicines in other healthcare sectors (principally NHS secondary and primary care) are being investigated.
Measures to identify and improve poor medicines adherence. Research themes in partnership with pharmaceutical industry are evaluating the relationship between patient mood cycles and medicines adherence with an intention to optimise therapeutic outcomes. The research aims to test and understand which patients are likely to respond to medications with the aim to equip the Healthcare professionals with appropriate information not only to provide their duty of ensuring patients take their medication as agreed to obtain optimal benefit but also to ensure they are able to make educated recommendations on which therapy would be appropriate for certain patient subgroups depending on their mood profile types.
Prescribing indicators. Various indicators are used commonly to evaluate and quantify prescribing in primary care. Surprisingly there are no recognized, uniform measures of prescribing in NHS secondary care. This research theme is examining the development and validation of effective prescribing indicators for use in hospitals.
Optimising antibiotic usage. Antibiotic usage is being examined as a key therapeutic intervention with problems associated with prescribing in order to model prescribing indicator development and devise medicines optimisation strategies.
Controlling medicines waste. There is crude evidence that wastage of pharmaceuticals is commonplace. This research strand is designed to quantify precisely the amount, types and reasons why medicines are not used. The theme also explores patient and prescriber attitudes towards wasted pharmaceuticals.
Optimising prescribing through education. SCRIPT West Midlands SHA Prescribing Project - Raising Standards of Prescribing Competency in Foundation Year 1.(www.safeprescriber.org) This is a partnership between the medical schools at Birmingham and Warwick Universities. John leads the partnership funded by the WM SHA to develop an electronic prescribing education toolkit for F1 prescribers. This is a project in which 40 modules are being developed in an interactive electronic web based format to improve the competency of F1 prescribing. The evaluation of these modules is on-going.