Project 829 | SMART-AD: Screening for medication review applicability for people prescribed antidepressants

SMART-AD: Developing a screening tool for medication review applicability for people prescribed long-term antidepressants.

Why

People with mental health problems (like anxiety or depression) are often prescribed medicines to help them. These medicines are called antidepressants. Antidepressants can help with people’s mental health. But if they are used for many years, they can also cause other problems. People taking long-term antidepressants are more likely to have heart problems or die sooner than expected. Other options, such as counselling, are just as good as antidepressants for helping people with depression.
Pharmacists have been asked by the NHS to review people prescribed long-term antidepressants in their GP surgeries. In these reviews, they can suggest different options to help people with their mental health instead of medicines. They can also help people who want to change or come off their antidepressants. However, there are more people prescribed long-term antidepressants than doctors and pharmacists have appointments to review them.

What

We want to make a questionnaire that patients prescribed long-term antidepressants can take that will help pharmacists see the people who would get the most out of a review with them.

How

We will do our research in two parts:
Part 1: We will look at research that has already been done about how pharmacists review people taking long-term antidepressants to give us some ideas. We talk through these ideas with patients, pharmacists, doctors and mental health experts and ask them what they think should be in the questionnaire. We will take all these views and make our first draft from them. We will then talk through our draft questionnaire with people to see how well it reads and what they think, to make it better.

Part 2: We will test our questionnaire. We will do this by having 10 GP practices give the questionnaire to people before they have a review with a pharmacist about their antidepressants. We will then look at what happened in the review and link it with how people responded to the questionnaire. We will also interview some of these patients to see what they thought of the review and the questionnaire.