Helping to Monitor Medicines
In Welsh, ‘adre’ means 'homeward', to a place of safety where you can enjoy your health and wellbeing, and this sums up the ethos behind ADRe, the Adverse Drug Reaction profile.
Adverse drug reactions (known as ADRs) can occur both in the home, and within the healthcare setting, when combinations of medications produce unexpected side effects. Unfortunately this means that in the most serious cases fatalities can occur. However ADRe has helped all service users by addressing life-threatening problems, reducing pain or improving quality of life.
With preventable ADRs responsible for 5-8% unplanned hospital admissions in the UK, and costing the NHS up to £2.5bn pa, it is crucial that healthcare organisations take advantage of tools which can help improve how medicines are managed. ADRe has been developed with the aid of nursing professionals to help nursing staff take a structured approach to the monitoring of medicines, identifying any ADRs service users may be experiencing, and then making changes to improve a patients' health and wellbeing.
Adre is included in WHO’s collection of resources on the webpages of ‘The Third WHO Global Patient Safety Challenge: Medication without harm? Under Global Patient Safety Challenge, and ‘Related reading’ “You can find a wide range of articles relating to medication safety, including research, risks, opinion pieces and examples of good practice, on the hub.” https://www.pslhub.org/learn/patient-safety-in-health-and-care/medication/
Register
If you would like to request a copy of ADRe, or stay informed about new developments then please register here.
