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The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) is seeking views on its draft professional guidance on polypharmacy.
Although aimed primarily at pharmacy professionals, the draft document — ‘Polypharmacy: Getting our medicines right’ — is also intended to be useful to other healthcare professionals, carers and patients. It gives an overview of the current scale of polypharmacy; the reasons why many patients are prescribed multiple medicines; the risks of inappropriate polypharmacy, and opportunities to tackle the issue.
The guidance is intended to be aspirational: that is, to identify what best practice could look like rather than to describe current systems in place. However, it signposts to existing work on inappropriate polypharmacy carried out by bodies including NHS Scotland and the All Wales Medicines Strategy Group.
An independent multidisciplinary steering group, chaired by Claire Howard, clinical lead for medicines optimisation at Wessex Academic Health Science Network, has developed the draft guidance.
Consultation responses can be submitted through SurveyMonkey.
The consultation closes on 28 August 2018.
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