One in six elderly ‘prescribed wrong medicine’

Almost one in six elderly people is being prescribed potentially inappropriate medicines, often because they are interacting with so many different sections of the health system.

A study by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and Trinity College Dublin has found 14% of people over the age of 65 have been prescribed at least one inappropriate form of medication in their lives, while 30% had, on at least one occasion, not been prescribed clinically indicated medications their condition required.

The most common form of medication not prescribed, when it could have been, were “antidepressant drugs in the presence of patients with moderate to severe depressive symptoms that could last at least three months”.