How do you influence the prescribing habits of an entire country? This is the task of NHS England’s National Clinical Director of Prescribing Professor Tony Avery.
How do we manage Chronic Pain? We talk to Louise Trewern who has herself lived with chronic pain since childhood. After years of strange illnesses, infections and persistent pain Louise was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and prescribed a stupor-inducing cocktail of opioids, antidepressants and benzodiazepines.
What is more important? Quality of life or length of life? A question that our guest, Deborah Duval, faces on a daily basis and she shares with us her experiences of being a recipient of multiple transplants and how she balances a busy lifestyle with a gruelling and complex treatment regimen
We chat to Professor Debi Bhattacharya - Professor of Behavioural Medicine at the University of Leicester and a primary care pharmacist. Debi led on research into a behaviour change toolkit designed to reduce opioid prescribing and is now actively involved in a programme designed to implement this at a systems level.
We chat to Dr Wasim Baqir - a senior pharmacist from the Pharmacy Integration Programme at NHS England. Was takes us through his career and work with developing pharmacy services with NHS England and in particular we discuss his work on medicines optimisation in care homes as part of the Health Foundations Shine Programme – a genuine game-changer.
A real pleasure this week to welcome one the Pharmaceutical Journal's ‘Women to Watch in 2022’ Nkiruku Umuaru. Nikkie is currently the Pharmacy Foundation Head of School, Interim Education and Postgraduate Pharmacy Lead at the University of Herefordshire. We chat to Nikkie about medicines in older people, and in particular how to have good conversations with them about their medicines.
We are joined by Consultant Geriatrician and bestselling author Dr Lucy Pollock. As Lucy tells us - we all become old if we are lucky. But how do we deal with it - as people and as health professionals? We chat about Lucy’s experience in working with the elderly and the importance of honesty, humour and shared decision making.
This week we are joined from Canada by Professor James McCormack, a pharmacist and co-host of the Best Science Medicine Podcast and is world renowned for his entertaining take on shared decision making and using evidence based information. James also uses music to teach others about polypharmacy and deprescribing. No, really!
Lelly began her career in community pharmacy and then worked as a primary care pharmacist, becoming the first UK community based consultant pharmacist in 2007. Her current role is at Guys and St Thomas and involves optimising medicines use in frailty, multimorbidity and polypharmacy.
Mark is an NHS GP and award winning journalist. He spends half his week working as a GP partner in rural Gloucestershire, and the rest investigating and reporting on the latest developments in medicine. We chat to Mark about his new practice pharmacy professionals, deprescribing, and the six-week wait for hospital discharge communication.
Rachel is a pharmacist and Professor of Health Economics at University of Manchester. Rachel has worked with Datalab, NICE and Academic Health Science networks to contribute health economics input of commissioning. We chat to Rachel about ‘having a foot in two camps’, rationing and the over-use of technology to solve problems.
We chat to Dr Tessa Lewis a GP in Blaenavon, Wales and a Therapeutics and Medical Advisor. As well as being the author of the renowned ‘NO-TEARS’ medication review framework Tessa was awarded the ‘Distinguished Contribution to NICE Award’ for her contribution to its work.
We meet our first guest, Clare Howard who has worked in pharmacy since she was 16 and in the past was Deputy Chief Pharmaceutical Officer for NHS England. She is now the Medicines Optimisation Clinical Director for the Wessex Academic Health & we discuss polypharmacy, PINCER, multimorbidity as well as middle aged apathy.