Prof. Rob Horne was invited from 21st to 22nd January 2020 by the Department of Social and Clinical Pharmacy to introduce his scientific expertise and discuss the methods about medication taking behaviour with students and researchers. We greatly appreciate his visits, which brought us new insights into this research and its implementation into clinical practice.
Rob Horne is Professor of Behavioural Medicine at University College London (UCL) School of Pharmacy, where he is a founder and a director of the Centre for Behavioural Medicine. Further, he is UCL Academic Lead for the Centre for the Advancement of Sustainable Medical Innovation (CASMI), a joint undertaking with the University of Oxford; he is a Founding Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, Fellow of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine, Royal College of Physicians etc. Rob Horne is the top researcher in the role of psychological and behavioural factors in explaining variation in response to treatment. With clinical pharmacy in his undergraduate background as well as with PhD in health psychology, he formed the theory of planned behaviour and developed the Beliefs about Medicines Questionnaire (BMQ) and Medication Adherence Report Scale (MARS). BMQ is focused on indirect evaluation of medication adherence and is spread all over the world. Current interests of Rob Horne are the development of interventions to support optimal engagement with essential treatments and effective medical innovations and on optimising the non-specific effects (placebo and nocebo components) of medicines. In the last decade, his research has generated over 140 peer-reviewed publications and grants of over £30 million (£4.9 million as Principal Investigator).
The Department of Social and Clinical Pharmacy is also focused on research of medication adherence as a part of a pharmacoepidemiologic research. There have been published several scientific papers regarding this important issue including using Czech validated versions of BMQ-CZ and MARS-CZ. With Jiri Vlcek as a head of local organising committee, we were also engaged in organising Prague Annual Meeting of the European Society of Patient Adherence, Compliance, and Persistence (ESPACOMP) in 2015.
The program of the visit began on 21st January with workshop with PhD students and researchers of the Department of Social and Clinical Pharmacy. Two ongoing PhD projects were discussed in terms of How to monitor and assess medication taking behaviour of health care professionals and patients – social and psychological aspects. Altogether, future projects running in UCL School of Pharmacy and Department of Social and Clinical Pharmacy were discussed.
In the afternoon of the same day, prof. Rob Horne had a lecture named “The Beliefs about Medicines Questionnaire (BMQ) and Research projects at the Centre of Behavioural Medicine – challenges to research of medicines in real world”. This lecture was intended for postgraduate and undergraduate students, researchers and clinicians and it preceded by welcome word by prof. Jiri Vlcek and by introducing medication adherence research at the Department by Dr. Katerina Mala-Ladova. The whole day was accompanied by really friendly and inspiring atmosphere, which was underlined with social event with department staff by means of playing the badminton.
The second day of the visit (22nd January), prof. Rob Horne was invited as a plenary speaker during the 10th Postgraduate and Postdoc Conference. With his lecture “Understanding and addressing non-adherence to medicines” he demonstrated the meaning of this research in evaluation of therapeutic value of medicines. Lecture by Rob Horne was engrossing for a broad auditorium without the scientific background of adherence and everyone enjoyed it.
In the afternoon, prof. Rob Horne and prof. Jiri Vlcek were chairing the session of Clinical and Social Pharmacy, where 11 works of PhD students were presented. Although, they were related to various aspects of pharmacotherapy (e.g. drug-related problems in kidney transplant patients, antibiotic or anticoagulation prophylaxis, optimizing pharmacotherapy in geriatric patients), they brought interesting research messages and came up with attractive discussion.
We are honoured to host Professor Rob Horne, the expert in medication adherence related problems, who pointed out current scientific methods in effective measuring behaviour of health care professionals and patients and their role in therapeutic value of medicines.
This project NO. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000841: Efficiency and safety improvement of current drugs and nutraceuticals: advanced methods – new challenges (EFSA–CDN) is co-funded by the European Union.
Text: prof. Jiří Vlček, Dr. Kateřina Malá
Photo: Andrea Pezzillo, Marcela Jeřábková, Dr. Kateřina Malá