International journal of clinical pharmacy
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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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Clinical pharmacy in a hospital setting is relatively new in Sweden. Its recent introduction at the University Hospital in Uppsala has provided an opportunity for evaluation by other relevant professionals of the integration of clinical pharmacists into the health-care team. ⋯ The majority of the respondents, both GPs and hospital based physicians and nurses, were satisfied with the new collaboration with the ward based pharmacists and perceived that the quality of the patients' drug therapy and drug-related patient safety had increased.
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There is a need to expand clinical pharmacy services to cover the ambulatory pediatric cancer patients. There is a paucity of published literature describing pharmacy services in this setting. ⋯ Developing pediatric hematology-oncology clinical pharmacy services to cover the outpatient setting is essential to ensure continuity of care and to optimize therapeutics.
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With increasing deregulation of prescription-only medicines and drive for self-care, pharmacists have greater scope to manage more conditions. This brings added responsibility to be competent healthcare professionals who deliver high quality evidence-based patient care. ⋯ Safety was the primary concern when making decisions about over-the counter medicines. Pharmacists lacked knowledge of evidence-based practice and considered medicines which lacked evidence of effectiveness to have an important role in self-care. These factors present barriers to the widespread implementation of evidence-based practice.