Co-design-related approaches in medication safety for people with dementia: A scoping review

People with dementia manage complex medication regimens and face a heightened risk of medication-related harm. Co-design approaches are increasingly being used to develop interventions/tools to improve medication safety in this population.

To describe how co-design has been applied in developing interventions or tools related to medication safety involving people with dementia and/or carers.

We conducted a scoping review across seven electronic databases (MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Embase, Scopus, Association for Computing Machinery and Cochrane Library) to identify studies that adopted co-design. We evaluated which co-design phases (pre-design, generative, evaluative and post-design) were applied in each study.

Eight studies met the inclusion criteria. Two studies involved people with dementia and/or carers across all co-design phases. Studies adopted co-design approaches to inform intervention content, identify areas of improvement and/or increase their implementation in practice. Most studies involved people with dementia and/or carers in two phases of co-design (n = 4), the generative and evaluative phases. The evaluative phase was the most frequently used (n = 7), followed by the generative phase (n = 5) and lastly the pre-design (n = 3) and post-design phases (n = 3). Interventions addressed deprescribing (n = 4), medication management (n = 3 and prescribing cascades (n = 1). Reported benefits included improved relevance, accessibility and usability of interventions through stakeholder input.

Co-design in medication safety for dementia care remains inconsistently applied and reported. Greater emphasis on meaningful involvement across all phases is needed to ensure interventions reflect lived experience. The utilisation of co-design frameworks may improve the reporting of co-design approaches in medication safety studies.