ADRe – Giving Patients a Voice in their Own Medicines
Over recent years research and analysis by numerous groups and organisations has shown that adverse drug reactions, otherwise known as side-effects, which can actually be prevented put a significant burden on our healthcare systems. For example, it has been shown that they:
- Account for 5-8% of unplanned hospital admissions in the UK
- Account for a fifth of preventable emergency re-admissions which happen within one year of discharge
- Result in 4-6% of the occupied hospital beds in the UK
- Cost the NHS £1-2.5bn annually and result in approximately $30bn of expenditure in the USA
- Equally as common within the primary care setting
In fact, inadequate monitoring of patients is actually a greater problem than anything caused by poorly prescribed medications. Enhancing the quality of the patient monitoring that takes place using ADRe has been shown to enable these previously unnoticed problems to be identified and addressed.
(ADRe was formerly known as WWADR, the West Wales Adverse Drug Reaction Profile)