IMPRESS version 1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Inpatient Medication and Patient Relationships – Electronic Systems
IRAS ID
131434
Contact name
Bryony D Franklin
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
Research summary
Putting patients at the centre of healthcare has been shown to improve their health. More recently, attention has also been given to greater involvement of patients in enhancing their own safety; however little is known about what is effective. A relatively new technology that is being developed in hospitals is inpatient computerised prescribing which may result in medication records, and thus prescribing and pharmacist checking, becoming more remote from the patient; this creates an additional potential barrier to inpatient involvement in medication safety which has not yet been explored. In depth work is needed to establish existing practice, understand barriers to patient involvement and develop effective ways of helping patients get more involved.\n\nWe will carry out observations to investigate if and how healthcare professionals support hospital inpatients to participate in medication safety (eg by checking their inpatient medication records, handing over information between professionals, prompting to avoid doses being missed), and then conduct interviews to identify the things that healthcare professionals and patients believe are appropriate for patients to do to ensure their medication is given correctly. These observations and interviews will be conducted on wards which have established electronic prescribing, those with recently introduced electronic prescribing and those using paper-based medication records. This will enable us to explore how the use of paper-based versus electronic medication records may affect such behaviours. As a follow up to this, we will carry out a two stage service development project. First, we will discuss our findings with a patient panel to identify what patients believe could be done to help inpatients participate more actively with safety of their medication. Second, we will hold discussions with a range of healthcare professionals to address issues relating to putting those things in practice.\n
REC name
East of England - Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
13/EE/0357
Date of REC Opinion
26 Sep 2013
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion