Medicines in Acute and Chronic Care

A GP prescribes a drug, a hospital pharmacist checks for interactions, and a patient takes multiple pills each day—but no one has a complete picture of how those medicines actually work together across the UK's diverse population. This matters because one in four people in the UK now lives with two or more long-term conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, and depression. These patients often take five or more different medicines simultaneously, yet clinical guidelines are typically based on trials that excluded them. The result is a dangerous gap: doctors lack evidence on which drug combinations work best for which patients, and whether benefits outweigh harms for specific groups. The research will build a detailed map linking patient symptoms, diagnoses, care received, medicines prescribed, and health outcomes—using real-world data from GP surgeries and hospitals. It will pay particular attention to people with multiple conditions and to health inequalities linked to race and ethnicity, where both multimorbidity and polypharmacy are more common. If successful, this work will change how clinical guidelines are written, moving from one-size-fits-all advice toward tailored recommendations for individual patients. It could also help doctors and policymakers spot harmful drug combinations before they cause harm, and identify which patients benefit most from which treatments. The programme aims to improve patient care across the UK and internationally.