Professor Nick Barber

‘A novel approach to patient centred decision making about medicines: Seeking eupharmia!’

Professor Nick Barber BPharm, PhD, FRCPharm, FRSM

Emeritus Professor of Pharmacy at UCL School of Pharmacy

Following a PhD in Clinical Pharmacology, Nick ran hospital pharmacies before returning to academia as one of Europe’s first professors of pharmacy practice. His work is focused on improving people’s lives with medicines. He has published over 200 research papers and been cited more than 26,000 times. Much of his work has been in collaboration with disciplines ranging from philosophy to mathematical modelling. His 1995 BMJ paper asking “What is good prescribing?” provided a framework which was adopted by the National Prescribing Centre and used to review GP prescribing. His work on medication errors led to changes in national policies in care homes and his non-adherence work was the basis of the New Medicine Service. Provided by community pharmacies, it delivered 7 million consultations last year.

Nick is a former Vice President of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and winner of their Lifetime Achievement Award. He has been Director of Research at the Health Foundation and Mentor-in-Chief at the Health Improvement Studies Institute, Cambridge. Non-executive director roles include the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and West London NHS Trust, which provides mental and community health to West London and Broadmoor Hospital. He presented the BBC series “Victorian Pharmacy”. He is currently Head of Clinical Outcomes at the technology start-up Aide Health. His first book for the public, “How to Take Drugs”, was published by Macmillan in May. It re-sets our relationship with medicines, empowering patients with an approach to support their decision making about medicines. In doing so it provides a vision for the future of medicines in our societies.

In his presentation, Professor Barber will draw on the arguments presented in his new ‘How to Take Drugs’. He proposes that the existence of a good relationship between a person and their medicine, something he calls eupharmia, should be an important consideration in prescribing. He argues that drugs have significant limitations as a technology, and therefore we need to adopt special approaches to ensure that people get the best out of their medicines, or decide not to take them. He will provide a decision tree drawn from other human relationships and will speculate on the way this could be implemented in the future as roles and technologies develop.

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