HOW IMPORTANT PHARMACEUTICAL IN HOSPITALS

 HOW IMPORTANT PHARMACEUTICAL IN HOSPITALS

By Daily News Reporter

 

The importance of a pharmaceutical care plan in hospitals

Medicines if appropriately used provide relief to patients and if not used accordingly risk an individual’s health. The latter increases therapy related expenditures incurred by both the patient and the government. There are a number of measures that have been put in place in order to curb practices that lead to irrational use of medicines. One of them is the use of the Pharmaceutical Care Plan (PCP) in hospital settings.

The PCP is a patient- centered systemic approach designed in a written format by a pharmacist. When creating the PCP, the pharmacist collects certain information from the patient such as age, sex, height, past illnesses, medication history and present medication, any drug allergy, lifestyle among others. The pharmacist then moves on to assess the actual problem by taking note of the patient’s chief complaint in collaboration with vital signs such as blood pressure and lab results. Drug related problems are then identified and the pharmacist develops definite therapeutic goals which may include curing a specific disease, reducing the symptoms, slow disease progression or prevent a particular disease or symptoms.

The PCP ensures appropriate use of medicines. To achieve this, the pharmacist suggests interventions such as initiating new drug, discontinuing drug, increasing or decreasing the dosage regimen or entirely changing the drug or formulation. It also prevents costly or toxic therapies from taking place whilst paying particular attention to achieving the desired outcome. It also helps strengthen collaboration and exchange of data between different healthcare providers.

The PCP decreases the number of potential drug related problems that tend to be the leading cause of both mortality and morbidity. These include untreated indication, under-dose or overdose, failure to receive medication at the right time and adverse effects. It also helps the pharmacist to be on the look-out for any undesired drug interactions which include drug-drug, drug-food and drug-disease interactions. An example of a drug-drug interaction is between sildenafil commonly known as blue diamond used in erectile dysfunction and isorsobide mononitrate which is used in the management of angina. Sildenafil significantly increases the blood-pressure lowering effects of isosorbide mononitrate and this may lead to fatal hypotension especially in cardiac patients. An example of a drug-disease interaction is the use Tenofovir Disoproxil Fumarate (TDF) which is a common drug used in the management of HIV/AIDS. TDF is known to have harmful effects on the kidney tubules especially in patients with established Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). The resultant effect may be progression of disease to kidney failure. An example of drug-food interaction is how the absorption of ciprofloxacin which is a broad spectrum antibiotic used in management of most infections in our region is significantly reduced with concomitant ingestion of milk or other dairy products like yogurt.

In a nutshell, the importance of generating a pharmaceutical care plan in hospital settings cannot be overemphasised. This is because it shows the relationship between achieving the goals of therapy in a patient and the kind of pharmaceutical interventions that have been made or need to be made to achieve those goals.