Pharmacy Research UK announces first grant awardee

The first recipient of the Pharmacy Research UK’s (PRUK’s) project grants has been revealed as Professor Bryony Dean Franklin from UCL School of Pharmacy.

Franklin has been awarded nearly £93k to investigate the use of patient-held information about medication (PHIMed) to support medicines optimisation over an 18-month period. The overall aim of this project will be to discern how PHIMed is used in practice, what the barriers and facilitators to its use are, and the key features it offers to support medicines optimisation. All these factors will then be used to develop an optimal PHIMed solution for testing in a future trial.

“We are delighted to fund Professor Franklin and her team at UCL,” confirmed Dr Rachel Joynes, executive director at PRUK. “The quality of applications for these grants was extremely high and we are excited to fund this vitally important project. The risks of poor health information transfer are well known and we hope that this project will start to address some of those issues.”

“We know that when people move from one healthcare setting to another (such as from their own home to hospital), errors can occur in communication of information about their medicines. We also know that many patients want to be more active partners in their healthcare and that many use different types of patient-held information about medication (abbreviated to ‘PHIMed’), both paper and electronic, to help them remember their current medicines,” stated Franklin. “However, we do not know how PHIMed should best be used or what the most important features are. Discussions with patients and carers also suggest this is an important area. I am therefore absolutely delighted that PRUK are enabling us to do this research.”