Yes / Multiple changes are made to older patients' medicines during hospital admission, which can sometimes cause confusion and anxiety. This results in problems with post-discharge medicines management, for example medicines taken incorrectly, which can lead to harm, hospital readmission and reduced quality of life.
To explore the experiences of older patients and their family carers as they enacted post-discharge medicines management.
Semi-structured interviews took place in participants' homes, approximately two weeks after hospital discharge. Data analysis used the Framework method.
Recruitment took place during admission to one of two large teaching hospitals in North England. Twenty-seven participants aged 75 plus who lived with long-term conditions and polypharmacy, and nine family carers, were interviewed.
Three core themes emerged: impact of the transition, safety strategies and medicines management role. Conversations between participants and health-care professionals about medicines changes often lacked detail, which disrupted some participants' knowledge and medicines management capabilities. Participants used multiple strategies to support post-discharge medicines management, such as creating administration checklists, seeking advice or supporting primary care through prompts to ensure medicines were supplied on time. The level to which they engaged with these activities varied.
Participants experienced gaps in their post-discharge medicines management, which they had to bridge through implementing their own strategies or by enlisting support from others. Areas for improvement were identified, mainly through better communication about medicines changes and wider involvement of patients and family carers in their medicines-related care during the hospital-to-home transition. / This work was supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Yorkshire and Humber Patient Safety Translational Research Centre (NIHR Yorkshire and Humber PSTRC). This independent research is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) under its Research for Patient Benefit (RfPB) Programme (Grant Reference Number PB-PG-0317-20010).
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/18541 |
Date | 29 June 2021 |
Creators | Tomlinson, Justine, Silcock, Jonathan, Smith, H., Karban, Kate, Fylan, Beth |
Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Article, Published version |
Rights | © 2020 The Authors Health Expectations published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited., CC-BY |
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