Persons living in long-term care (LTC) often take many medications. With increasing numbers of medications, the chance of medication-related harm increases. This includes falls, hospitalizations, and side effects. It is important that all medications a person takes are beneficial, safe, and align what matters most to an individual. This results in quality medication use. Doctors, pharmacists, and nurses need strategies and tools to work toward quality medication use for people living in LTC. They need these strategies and tools to be practical and realistic to use in busy, real-life clinical practice.
To develop strategies and tools that can promote quality medication use in BC LTC, it is important to understand the true priorities in this context. That is, what are topics related to quality medication use in BC LTC that are most important to address? These topics need to be identified by relevant interest holders (clinicians practising in LTC, LTC administrators, residents/carers, health system personnel). Priority medication use topics can serve as quality indicators which homes use to identify areas of success and need for improvement.
When improvement is needed, LTC homes may employ strategies to improve the quality of medication use. To ensure quality medication use strategies and tools are practical and realistic, we also need to understand medication management and workflows across BC LTC. This ensures that any strategies can be scalable, practically implemented, and lead to change in BC LTC.
Our objectives are:
1. Develop medication quality indicators for BC LTC using a modified Delphi approach and focus groups
2. Conduct an environmental scan of LTC medication management practices in BC using a rapid review, survey, and brief semi-structured interviews
Our team has a wide network of LTC interest holders in BC, including LTC clinicians, health system interest holders, resident/carer groups, and pharmacy providers. We will leverage these networks to complete the project. The project will be led by an intern who will gain valuable skills in developing collaborations and networking in the BC LTC context, gain methodological skills in conducting multi-methods research, and develop project management and leadership skills. This project will support Fraser Healths LTC group in identifying priority areas for quality medication use, and developing more targeted and practical strategies for improvement where needed.