Let’s Talk Differently About Medicines
Older people in the UK increasingly take ten or more medicines daily, a global patient safety crisis called polypharmacy. After five years of ethnographic research in surgeries, pharmacies and homes, we found that even medication reviews rarely resulted in stopping medicines. The problem was not missing information: it was the conditions of the conversation itself. Strikingly, when older people joined our co-design workshops to reimagine the medication review, even they, with full creative licence, could not bring themselves to stop medicines in fiction. In response, we crafted seven fictional short stories to open up the conversations that remain otherwise impossible to have.
Designer: Alison Thomson, Nina Fudge, Rachel Barnard, Deborah Swinglehurst
