Humanising Healthcare podcast - Personalising the use of medicines in older people

'Listen to the podcast on Spotify here' Personalising the use of medicines in older people

In this edition:

This week, Manasi was joined by Dr Jennifer Stevenson, Lead Pharmacist Older Adults/Honorary Senior Lecturer and Dr Carly Welch, Clinical Senior Lecturer on the episode ‘Personalising the use of medicines in older people.’ They discussed polypharmacy, the move towards ‘deprescribing’ medicine, and how ageing can affect the way the body absorbs medicines.

Dr Jennifer Stevenson is an Honorary Senior Lecturer and Clinical Pharmacist specialising in the optimisation of medicines in older adults. Her research, more specifically, focuses on advancing our understanding of medication-related harm in older adults living with frailty, and explores how to identify those at greatest risk of harm especially at the transition of care.

Her clinical speciality, as a pharmacist at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, is older adults where she works as an Integrated Care Pharmacist and is a key contributor to the NHS England London Frailty Network Education and Training workstream. She also supports teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate Pharmacy programmes.

Dr Carly Welch is a Senior Clinical Lecturer in Experimental Medicine and a Consultant Geriatrician at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. She previously completed her PhD on the topic of "Acute sarcopenia - the last remaining acute organ insufficiency" at the University of Birmingham in 2022. Her research interests including understanding the underlying ageing mechanisms that lead to impaired resilience in older adults, including the clinical manifestations of frailty, sarcopenia, and delirium. Her research aims to translate new therapies into clinical populations to improve quality of life in older people.

She was recently awarded a large grant from the Wellcome Leap Dynamic Resilience programme as Co-Principal Investigator through a collaboration between King's College London and the University of Birmingham. She works clinically within the Geriatric Oncology Liaison development (GOLD) service within Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust.

Manasi Nandi

Reader in Integrative Pharmacology

Manasi is a scientist and educator based within the Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the extraction of new information from vital signs data, aiding research and clinical decision making, and identifying earlier alerts of disease. She has expertise in medicine discovery and development and the translation of laboratory findings into clinical practice. She is a fellow of the British Pharmacological Society, most recently supporting efforts to embed inclusive principles into the national curriculum. Inclusivity and accessibility are at the core of her teaching and research practice. She is the Development, Diversity and Inclusion lead for the School and Cancer and Pharmaceutical Science, supporting EDI activities at Faculty and College level. She launched the Humanising Healthcare seminar series in 2023.