International journal of clinical pharmacy
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Impact of pharmaceutical care on health outcomes in patients with COPD.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) treatment goals are often not achieved despite the availability of many effective treatments. Furthermore, clinical pharmacist interventions to improve clinical and humanistic outcomes in COPD patients have not yet been explored and few randomized controlled trials have been reported to evaluate the impact of pharmaceutical care on health outcomes in patients with COPD. ⋯ The enhanced patient outcomes as a result of the pharmaceutical care programme in the present study demonstrate the value of an enhanced clinical pharmacy service in achieving the desired health outcomes for patients with COPD.
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Comparative Study
The effect of medication reconciliation in elderly patients at hospital discharge.
To assess the impact of medication reconciliation interventions on medication error rates when elderly patients are discharged from hospital to community care or nursing homes. ⋯ Medication errors are still common when elderly patients are transferred from hospital to community/primary care. The main risk factor seems to be the specific medication dispensing system (ApoDos) or rather the process on how to use it. When this system was supported by clinical pharmacists, the error rate dropped to the same level as for patients without ApoDos.
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The recommendation to restrict the use of activated protein C (APC) to patients with severe sepsis and the highest risk of death originates from large trials that were subject to major exclusion criteria. ⋯ These findings support the view that targeting APC treatment to patients with septic shock and a very high risk is a sound and safe approach. However, due to lack of consistent evidence from randomized studies APC was recently removed from the market.
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The aim of this study was to develop and validate a questionnaire for assessing HIV-infected patients' satisfaction with pharmaceutical care received in Nigerian HIV clinics. ⋯ The questionnaire developed is a reliable and valid instrument for assessing patient satisfaction with pharmaceutical care in HIV clinics in Nigeria. Further research is needed to expand the instruments' robustness.
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Data concerning the extent of off-label prescriptions for adult neurological patients are limited, and the method of assessing supporting evidence in previous studies has some limitations. ⋯ The improved method provided a supplementary way to study off-label uses. Off-label prescriptions for adult neurological patients mainly concerned unapproved indications, nervous system agents and cerebrovascular diseases, and many of them had inferior level of evidence.