60% of care home patients ‘prescribed inappropriate drugs’

Almost 60% of patients in public nursing homes have been prescribed a potentially inappropriate medicine, a study has found.

Researchers at University College Cork, who looked at data from a number of publicly funding nursing homes in Munster, identified 329 instances of potentially inappropriate prescribing involving 187 patients.

The research, published in the journal Age and Ageing by Oxford University Press, found that 59.8% of patients had been prescribed a potentially inappropriate medicine.