In late 1990’s health professionals and academics were concerned that more could be done around the regular monitoring of a patient’s care to ensure that service users were thoroughly checked for any side effects from their medicines.
Although users of the healthcare system do see a medical prescriber, conversations are usually informal and can lack detailed and direct questions. In addition to this, medical prescribers can only spend approximately 10-15 minutes on each individual due to their other duties. This creates an environment in which allows any information on possible side effects may be over-looked (Seale et al 2007, Quirk et al 2012).
Research & development carried out in the School of Health and Social Care, initially focused on innovative teaching initiatives as a way to help address this issue, the result of which was the West Wales Adverse Drug Reaction profile (WWADR). This profile, when completed, created a comprehensive record of potentially drug-related problems, which prescribers could consider when reviewing service users and their treatments, filling a care gap (Jordan and Hughes 1996).
Practitioners and students later requested guidelines for the Profile, resulting in further research to bring in service users and other stakeholder in the development and update of the profile (Jordan et al 2000), and these were published with a revised Profile in 2004 (Jordan et al 2004). The new revised content was based on practice guides for nurses, peer reviewed and published by Nursing Standard, in conjunction with the Royal College of Nursing (Jordan & Pointon 2005, Hewitt and Jordan 2005, Jordan and Afzal 2005, Jordan 2008).
Further investigative work followed in 2007 to explore the availability of other measures and evidence which aimed to identify and manage adverse drug reactions (position paper, Jordan 2007). This enabled the profile to draw on the best available evidence.
Further updates of the Profile were later published in 2014 and 2015 (Jordan et al 2014, 2015), and renamed ADRe to reflect its aims and ethos.
You can find the protocol for a systematic review of methods to address adverse drug reactions here:
You can find out more about the work of Professor Jordan through her profile page