23. How community pharmacy can buck the inverse care law with Prof Adam Todd

Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Meds and the PrescQIPP podcast, engaging conversations about medicines-related dilemmas. Today, your host Jonathan Underhill, Medicines Clinical Adviser at PrescQIPP, talks to Prof Adam Todd about inequalities in the use of medicines and the role of pharmacy in addressing that.

Adam Todd is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Public Health, and Deputy Head of the School of Pharmacy at Newcastle University. He is a qualified pharmacist and a Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. Previous to that he was Programme Director for the MPharm course at Durham and Deputy Director of the Centre of Health and Inequalities Research. That led him into leading some truly innovative research into inequalities in the use of medicines and how pharmacy can perhaps help to buck the inverse care law* (*where those who most need access to healthcare are the least likely to do so).

Adam still contributes to the care of patients on a regular basis working with at St. Benedict’s Hospice in Sunderland helping with person-centred and appropriate medicines use (and of course where deprescribing can be considered). He also regularly works as a community pharmacist – which helps ensure he isn't just one of those academics that can be accused of being detached from the real world!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Prof Adam Todd's published research
• The Positive Pharmacy Care Law Revisited: an area-level analysis of the relationship between community pharmacy distribution, urbanity and deprivation in England.
• The Inverse Care Law - Julian Tudor Hart
• Tackling the inverse care law - Analysis of policies to improve general practice in deprived areas since 1990
• Marmot Review report – 'Fair Society, Healthy Lives

A new episode of Talking Meds will be available every other Friday.
If you have feedback or suggestions for future topics and guests please submit them to talkingmeds@prescqipp.info

PrescQIPP is funded by the NHS for the NHS, and our aim is to improve medicines-related care for patients. We do this by producing high quality evidence-based resources and training, and by facilitating networks between NHS organisations and professionals.

The majority of pharmacists and other healthcare professionals across the UK can access our resources by registering and logging on to our website. If you have any difficulty accessing the website you can email help@prescqipp.info and we’ll aim to sort things out for you.

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