CHARMER is a five year (2020-2025) England-wide research project to develop and test an approach to increasing discussions with older hospital patients about stopping medicines that are no longer useful and could be harmful. This is called proactive deprescribing.
Our aim is to help ensure that older people who take a number of medicines have them all considered whenever they are admitted to hospital for any reason. Patients have told us that their hospital stay is often a missed opportunity to review all of their medicines. We have examined the reasons why a medicine review doesn’t always happen and designed an approach in the form of training for geriatricians and pharmacists that should ensure that it does happen. We are now testing this approach in a number of hospitals to see how well it works.
