About the project

Following local medicines safety work, it has been identified that Transfer of Care Around Medicines (TCAM) is one of the highest risk areas for Medicines Optimisation (MO) in care homes.

Care home residents are especially vulnerable to the adverse effects of medicines due to age, frailty, co-morbities and polypharmacy. The transfer of care presents an even higher risk to this fragile cohort of patients due to a lower resilience and higher susceptibility to hospital-acquired infections. Patients being discharged from hospital to care homes often are unable to have TCAM referrals to their community pharmacist, as they have little knowledge of which community pharmacist serves their care home and any such service is often for medicines supply only and provides no clinical intervention.

The TCAM to care homes project provides a means of electronic referral of residents on discharge from hospital directly to the pharmacy teams providing services to care homes.

Project ambitions

The project will monitor how the implementation of TCAM to care homes impacts the following:

• Readmission rate of residents to hospital
• Length of stay of readmitted patients
• Number of ambulance conveyances
• Numbers of GP call outs (in and out of hours)
• Medicines savings in terms of medicines stopped, number of structured medication reviews and number of reviews of long term conditions

Our work

Case study: Transfer of Care Around Medicines (TCAM) to Care Homes

Find out more

Get in touch with a member of the project team below to find out how you can get involved.

• Emma Suggett, Associate Director Innovation Development: emma.suggett@healthinnovationwm.org