A balancing act: Managing multiple medications.

 Aneurin Bevan University Health Board and Oxford Health NHS Trust

Tessa is a GP, Her working week for over 20 years has been split between a clinical role as frontline GP, and therapeutics. Since leaving partnership she has developed an interest in frailty. She Chairs the suite of NICE common infection guidelines and has brought the primary care perspective to the  NICE Quality Standards and Indicators Advisory Committees as a member. As medical adviser she works with colleagues nationally to support issues such as antimicrobial stewardship, anticoagulation, and polypharmacy. She currently works with AWTTC to provide therapeutic rapid update webinars. In 2004, she published the NO TEARS tool for medication review.

Lucy is a consultant geriatrician. She is passionate about high quality patient-centred care of older people. She enjoys meeting students and AHPs, and watching trainees learn what it is about geriatric medicine that is so irresistible.

Lucy trained at Cambridge, Barts and several London hospitals before moving to Somerset in 1997. She chaired her trust’s clinical ethics committee for 10 years and contributed to the Medicine for Older People syllabus for Bristol University Medical School.

Cardiff and Vale University Health Board

Dr Laurence Gray trained in Wales and became a Consultant in Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology in 2017. He has a special interest in adverse drug reactions and contributed to the recent All Wales guidance on penicillin de-labelling in secondary care.

Professor Tony Avery, OBE, is National Clinical Director for Prescribing for NHS England. He is also a GP in Nottingham and Professor of Primary Health Care at the University of Nottingham.

He is passionate about ensuring the safe, effective and appropriate use of medicines and has worked in partnership with healthcare professionals and patients over 30 years to drive forward research and policy development in prescribing and patient safety.

He has led a number of major studies investigating the frequency, nature and causes of prescribing safety problems in the NHS. He has also developed effective methods for tackling hazardous prescribing, most notably the pharmacist-led, IT-based intervention called PINCER, which has now been rolled out nationally to general practices in England.