Minimising Harm from Medicines at Home

What is MINIMEDs?

MINIMEDs is a research project that is learning from the experiences of families who have had to give medicines to their infants and young children at home.

“Minimising harm…” means that we accept that it is impossible to remove all risk and harm with using medicines. Therefore, this project is looking at how we can help families to use medicine as safely as possible. A key part of this is to learn from families who already use medicines, and learn from them about how they have learnt themselves to minimise harm and give medicines as safely as possible.

From the research world, we are interested in an idea called ‘resilient healthcare’. The key word here is ‘resilient’ which means looking at how people are able do their best given challenges and stresses on them.

It has been funded by the National Institute for Health and Social Care Research (NIHR). The grant is called a ‘Doctoral Fellowship’ which means that Stephen (the researcher) is funded to do this research as part of a PhD at the University of Leeds.