Professor Bryony Dean Franklin

Professor Bryony Dean Franklin is visiting Professor at the Centre for Prevention and Management at Imperial College, Executive Lead Pharmacist (Research), Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Director of the Centre for Medication Safety and Service Quality (CMSSQ), a joint research unit between ICHT and UCL School of Pharmacy.  Bryony is one of the management team for the Imperial Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality.

The CMSSQ conducts work based around four overlapping research themes:

1. Medication Safety.  This is a key research area for us and an important research topic worldwide. The CMSSQ is recognised both nationally and internationally as a leader in the development of methods to study medication error.

2. Evaluating technology in medication use.  There is growing interest in the potential impact of technologies such as electronic prescribing, barcoding and automation on medication errors, and methods for evaluating these are essential.  Such technologies also affect how health care professionals work and may increase or decrease efficiency; such aspects much also be evaluated.  A significant proportion of our current research relates to this research area; very few other centres have experience in this field.

3. The use of anti-infectives . This is another important research area worldwide, as a result of growing concerns about the increasing resistance to anti-infectives. For example, the World Health Organisation’s “patient safety challenge” focuses on infection prevention and control.  Imperial is recognised as a leader in this field, in particular with respect to the role of pharmacists and multi-disciplinary teams in improving anti-infective use. The CMSSQ is one of the partners running the UK’s only MSc in Infection Management for Pharmacists.  We are therefore in a unique position of being able to combine Imperial’s experience in research into anti-infective use, with our extensive expertise in medication safety.

4. Patient adherence. This is a relatively new research stream for us; we aim to understand what influences patients' medication taking behaviour and how this affects their response to treatment, and how this may affect, and by affected by, other aspects of medication safety.