A/Prof Sarah Hilmer: Knowing about multiple medicines
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
A/Prof Sarah Hilmer
Main occupation: Clinical pharmacologist
Years in clinical practice at interview: 16
Qualifications: BScMed (Hons), MBBS (Hons), FRACP, PhD
Associate Professor Sarah Hilmer, clinical pharmacologist and geriatrician, gives her views on what is important for people to know about their medicines.
I think it's important that a person has an overall review of their medicines regularly and frequently and that doesn't have to happen in hospital. It can happen with their general practitioner in the community. It can happen with a specialist in the community, and a pharmacist can help out by doing a Home Medicines Review or a Residential Medication Management Review if the person is in residential aged care. And … ideally, if that's done regularly, people won't run into trouble from their medicines and won't wind up in the emergency department.
There are estimates that between 5 and 25% of admissions of older people to our emergency departments are related to adverse drug reactions and those are predominantly people with polypharmacy. And we could prevent a lot of those if we did regular reviews of all of a person's medicines in the community.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in
collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.