K. (Katja) Taxis, Prof

K Taxis (Katja) MPharm, MSc, PhD is full Professor of Pharmacotherapy and Clinical Pharmacy. She has a degree in pharmacy from University of Hamburg and and an MSc and PhD from the School of Pharmacy, University College London (UCL). She worked as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Tübingen before joining the University of Groningen in 2004. She is also the Programme Director of the Bachelor and Master of Science in Pharmacy. 

Research

The use of medicines is the most common intervention in clinical practice and the second most expensive part of healthcare. Worldwide, probably half of all medicines are inappropriately prescribed, dispensed or sold and half of all patients fail to take their medicine properly. Resistance to antimicrobials is seen as a top ten threat to public health. The use of medicines can be harmful for our environment, for example, pharmaceutical residues are increasingly contaminating water.

With my research team, I want to make the use of medicines safer and more effective for patients in a sustainable way; We do this by investigating drug utilization and developing and evaluating interventions to improve medicine use. The focus is on interventions to reduce pharmaceutical pollution of water, reduce overuse of medication in (older) people on polypharmacy (deprescribing) and optimise antibiotic use and reduce antimicrobial resistance). This includes projects in low and middle income countries. Often interventions involve pharmacists.