Behaviour
Older adults and informal caregivers expect healthcare professionals to
deprescribe medicines that are no longer appropriate (4). This requires
behaviour change from healthcare professionals. Deprescribing is a
complex and heterogenous process and the ‘target behaviour’, which is
the thing we are asking healthcare professionals to do, varies
depending on several factors. For example, asking healthcare
professionals to ‘reactively’ deprescribe medicines that have already
caused harm is a different behaviour to asking them to ‘proactively’
deprescribe medicines that may cause harm in the future. The first step
in changing behaviour is to define the target behaviour .