Award for withdraw of dementia medication

Royal North Shore Hospital’s Dr Emily Reeve was last night announced as a finalist for the Bupa Health Foundation Emerging Health Researcher Award, at the Research Australia Awards dinner.

She will receive $5,000 to further her research to develop guidelines to withdraw low-value medication for people with dementia.

Dr Reeve’s research focuses on deprescribing (withdrawing) medications that are high risk or unnecessary, where the risks of taking the medicine(s) outweigh the benefits for people with dementia.

Deprescribing is a neglected and under-researched area, despite its impact in improving health outcomes and reducing financial costs from low-value health care.

Dr Reeve’s current project will develop and implement deprescribing guidelines for people with dementia, which is important for our ageing population.

She is already an emerging leader in this area, having developed the world’s first questionnaire to understand patients’ attitudes to deprescribing and developed this further to understand attitudes of carers of older people.

Deprescribing has been adopted across Australia, in Europe and in North America.

The Bupa Health Foundation is one of the country’s leading private charitable organisations dedicated to health. The Foundation has invested almost $30 million since its establishment in 2005 to support over 100 projects to improve the health and wellbeing of Australians.

17 November 2016.