Achieving sustainable healthcare through deprescribing

Globally, healthcare systems are challenged with providing appropriate care to patients with complex care needs, multiple chronic conditions (multimorbidity) and multiple medications (polypharmacy). Multimorbidity is the rule rather than the exception in most healthcare interactions in primary and secondary care. But primary research, and therefore evidence synthesis and guidelines typically focus on the single‐morbidity population, providing little real‐world guidance to patients and clinicians in dealing with this complexity. As a result, there is a ‘pandemic’ of overtreatment with polypharmacy and potentially inappropriate medication use in frail, older adults, and people with multimorbidity.