Information about being on a CHARMER ward

CHARMER is a six-year (2020-2026) England-wide research project to develop and test an approach to increasing discussions with older hospital patients about stopping medicines that may no longer be useful and could be harmful.

All patients when admitted to hospital should have their medicines reviewed and only those that are appropriate should be continued. Patients have told us that they expect the hospital team to spot any medicines that are no longer beneficial and to discuss with them the option of stopping the medicine. We have developed a package of support for hospital doctors and pharmacists and then designed a research study to test whether it works.

Our aim is to see if we can support hospital doctors and pharmacists to regularly review medicines for all patients admitted to hospital and, for any medicines that might no longer be quite right, to discuss with the patient and together decide whether they should be stopped.

You will probably notice no difference because CHARMER is about supporting hospital doctors and pharmacists to improve what they are currently doing. All CHARMER wards will display a poster that looks like this.

Every patient who is admitted to hospital should have their medicines reviewed. Any medicines that might not be quite right for the patient should be discussed with them to decide together whether they should be stopped. On CHARMER wards, we are testing whether the support package helps hospital doctors and pharmacists regularly do this for all patients.

To see this on a map, please see here.

We will get reports back from each of these hospitals so that we can tell whether the support package worked.

For every CHARMER ward, we have permission for the NHS to give us information about the number of people readmitted to hospital and whether anyone died while in hospital. We will not get any names, medical or contact details. If you are on a CHARMER ward and do not want your admission to be included in the results that your hospital sends, please let a member of the ward team know and they will make sure that you are not included.

We would also like to hear from patients who have been on a CHARMER ward. Each hospital involved in CHARMER will invite patients on the ward during a two-month period to give information about their quality of life and experience of discussions about stopping medicines. If you are one of these people who are invited, you will be given a detailed information leaflet and time to think about whether you want to take part. The patient information leaflet that you will be given can be found here.

NHS England will link your medical data from different NHS records . NHS England will use identifiable information (for example NHS number, date of birth and postcode) to create a unique record.

After NHS England link your NHS records they will remove any personal information about you so that it is made anonymous before being given to the CHARMER researchers.

This has been legally approved for the CHARMER study by the Health Research Authority under section 251 of the NHS Act 2006. This approval allows for a temporary use of identifiable information. This ensures we link the correct data to the right person.

NHS England will only share your information with the CHARMER researchers. This information will be anonymous and will include information about hospital admissions, death records and medicines prescribed during the period of the study.

CHARMER researchers will not see your name, address, or date of birth.

The anonymous information shared with the CHARMER team is held in a secure research environment. It has strict information security measures meaning that it cannot be accessed or taken outside this environment in any form.

All of the above information will have been provided to the person on a CHARMER ward and can be downloaded here.

A group of patients and members of the public were involved in planning and developing CHARMER. They will remain involved throughout to help ensure that the information obtained from the project is used to benefit patients and the NHS.

CHARMER is funded by the UK government’s National Institute for Health and Care Research.

Email charmer.study@leicester.ac.uk.

If you are a patient on the ward (or care for someone) who has been approached by a research nurse to take part, you can ask them any questions you may have when you next see them. Alternatively, you can let the ward staff know that you would like to speak to them again.