Keynote Abstract:

Medicines, modelling and me

Nick Barber

Professor, Head of Department of Practice and Policy
School of Pharmacy, London, UK

Medicines are the most common treatment for ill health. They are used on a vast scale - in the NHS alone around 2,500,000 prescriptions are written every day. Getting the medicines, in the correct form, to the correct location, can be a substantial logistical problem. In addition the use of medicines is surrounded by substantial uncertainty and risk. How will the body deal with the medicines? What is the probability that health care practitioners make errors in prescribing, preparing or administering medicines? Or that the patient takes the medicines incorrectly? If problems occur, will they cause harm? How can we relate errors to harm? How can we devise safer systems? We have been exploring these areas with mathematical modellers for some years, and in the presentation I will present some of these studies, and additional research questions that modelling could address.