The small steps to improvement…

Over the years, the systems that control medicines have become overwhelming large and complex. This is both good and bad. The good side is that information about childrens’ medicines is much more available than it was when I started my career 20 odd years ago. Things like the BNF for Children and www.medicinesforchildren.net are really helpful resources.

However, the bad side is that trying to get these things to make improvements can be challenging. I wrote a blog article a while ago about how myself and a family had shared an experience of their child who had been harmed from their medicines. We published their experience, but it has taken ages and repeated requests to get prescribing guidelines updated.

I am pleased to say that our perseverance has paid off. We have managed to get a key prescribing guide to update their guidance. This guide is called ‘Drug Administration Via Enteral Feeding Tubes‘ (Pharmaceutical Press) and can be accessed either as a book or website.

This change to the website shows how important it is to be able to complete the whole cycle of lived experience, to research, to real world impact. Now that the case report is mentioned on the website, any professional who is considering asking a family to crush prochlorperazine should see this warning and take action to make sure the family are fully supported in how they use the medicine.

Incidentally, we noticed that the AI tools (ChatGPT and Copilot) had already picked up on our research when you asked them ‘is it safe to crush prochlorperazine tablets’. They clearly give a link to our work, so hopefully we are getting to even more families and professionals looking for advice.

We know that just publishing an article in a scientific journal usually isn’t enough to get the information to the front line where it can make a real difference for families. Learning to persevere with our pressure on systems to improve is an important skill that we hope to keep getting better at with this research project. We certainly will be having lots of recommendations for changes!