Medication safety
Summary: My research interest is in the field of medication safety. As lead patient safety officer for the university hospital of Basel and a titular professor for Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, I see my role in investigating medication safety issues and using this information to prevent adverse drug events for our patients. Methods include case-control, cohort, feasibility, pharmacokinetic and pharmacovigilance studies.
Research focus und area of research
Our research focus is medication safety - an area that I started working in more than 15 years ago. For my PhD thesis at Imperial College, University of London, UK, I investigated genetic and phenotypic questions about immunosuppression after heart transplantation. In collaboration with the Swiss Toxicological Information Center, I later went on to investigate the safety of overdoses with various immunosuppressants.
As Head of the medication safety program at the University Hospital of Basel, and Head of Patient Safety, I am also interested in the field of medication management. Over the years, we have examined the roles of clinical pharmacologists and electronic support systems in the medication prescription process in hospitals and have adapted an electronic-assisted trigger tool for surveillance of adverse drug events. Other collaborative studies have included the study of the pharmacokinetics of drugs during renal replacement procedures, risk factors for the development of agranulocytosis during treatment with metamizole, and the use and safety of statins in hematopoietic stem cell transplant patients. A further research area of our group is cohort studies in pharmacovigilance. We have examined the safety of azole antifungal agents, COVID-vaccines, checkpoint inhibitors and oral anticoagulants in large patient collectives.
Ongoing projects reflect the diverse nature of medication safety research. Our current areas of research are the safety of opioids used in the hospital setting as indicated by naloxone-administration, the feasibility of conducting a best possible medication history in the emergency department, adherence to Smarter Medicine guidelines for acute lower back pain, length of treatment with oral corticosteroids in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (a pharmacoepidmiological study), complications of vascular access devices and the user-acceptability of an electronic prescribing tool.
