What is it about?
Increasing number of older patients with multiple comorbidites on many drugs get hospitalized with issues related medications. Hospitalization is an opportunity to review medications in use for thier suitability and adherance. There are processess in hospitals to identify high risk patients for medication related injury. This paper looks at the process of medication reconciliation and medication review that are available at patients' journey from the community-hospital-community. Additionally the paper includes the views of the doctors and pharmacists; two key health professionals involved in the process,
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Why is it important?
The paper identifies the barriers to effective implementation of a process that potentially prevents medication related harm among patients at hospitalization and in the community. Doctors who play a key role have limited awareness of the process. It is expected that doctors would appreciate the value of the medication reconciliation and review process, and will not miss the opprtunity to go through medications at patient journey in the hospital, to assess the suitability and the adherance.
Perspectives
When writing the paper I realized that we were also evaluating a process among many others that exists in hospitals to prevent patient harm. There are many such care-pathways existing for many years without evaluation for their efficiency. We await a major adverse event to review a process that lead to the undesirable event. Many research work on medication reconciliation continues to get published in Pharmacy journals. I hope the readership will find this paper interesting.
Nimmi Athuraliya
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Medication reconciliation at two teaching hospitals in Australia: a missed opportunity?, Internal Medicine Journal, December 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/imj.13634.
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