Pharmacists

BACKGROUND: Medication review with follow-up is essential for optimising medication utilisation among the older adult population in primary healthcare. AIM: This study aimed to evaluate the feasibility of implementing medication reviews with follow-up for older adults in community pharmacies and examined potential outcomes on medication use. METHOD: A pilot randomised controlled trial was conducted with 4 cluster-randomised community pharmacies to assess the feasibility of the intervention...

BACKGROUND: Social media has fostered a landscape where trends, ideals, and beauty standards have significantly proliferated. Images of flawless skin, sculpted features, and curated aesthetics inundate user feeds, potentially shaping their self-perceptions and aspirations. The rise of influencers, dermatologist social media engagement, and beauty campaigns sharing skincare routines and product recommendations wield substantial influence over individual appearance-related decisions. AIMS: The main aim of this study is to determine the pattern of behavior in using social media to seek dermatological procedures and skin care routine...

BACKGROUND: The transition from hospital to outpatient care is a particularly vulnerable period for patients as they move from regular health monitoring to self-management. This study aimed to map and investigate the journey of patients with polymorbidities, including type 2 diabetes (T2D), in the 2 months following hospital discharge and examine patients' encounters with healthcare professionals (HCPs). METHODS: Patients discharged with T2D and at least two other comorbidities were recruited during hospitalization...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Effective communication skills are essential for all pharmacists, regardless of practice setting. An implicit need in pharmacy education is to emphasize direct application of these skills to future healthcare practice prior to experiential rotations. The aim of this article is to describe how we revised a required first professional year (P1) doctor of pharmacy course to achieve two main goals: 1) improve the course relevance by connecting content to real-world skills; and 2) qualify all pharmacy students at our institution as certified National Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) lifestyle coaches upon course completion...

OBJECTIVES: Potentially harmful non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) utilisation persists at undesirable rates worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on interventions to de-implement potentially harmful NSAIDs in healthcare settings and to suggest directions for future research. DESIGN: Scoping review. DATA SOURCES: PubMed, CINAHL, Embase, Cochrane Central and Google Scholar (1 January 2000 to 31 May 2022)...

BACKGROUND: Opioids are frequently prescribed for persistent non-cancer pain despite limited evidence of long-term effectiveness and risk of harm. Evidence-based interventions to address inappropriate opioid prescribing are lacking. AIM: To explore perspectives of people living with persistent pain to understand barriers and facilitators in reducing opioids in the context of a pharmacist-led primary care review, and identify review components and features for optimal delivery...

INTRODUCTION: There has been a paradigm shift in the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) over the past decade. With the advent of self-administered targeted oral anticancer agents (OAAs), the treatment of CLL has begun to shift from the infusion clinic to the patient's home. This introduced new challenges including patient non-adherence, class-specific adverse effects, and financial toxicity to treatment. In this paper, we discuss a structured approach to identifying and addressing barriers to optimal patient outcomes...

Diagnostic stewardship is increasingly recognized as a powerful tool to improve patient safety. Given the close relationship between diagnostic testing and antimicrobial misuse, antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) pharmacists should be key members of the diagnostic team. Pharmacists practicing in AMS already frequently engage with clinicians to improve the diagnostic process and have many skills needed for the implementation of diagnostic stewardship initiatives. As diagnostic stewardship becomes more broadly used, all infectious disease clinicians, including pharmacists, must collaborate to optimize patient care...

BACKGROUND: Macro and meso level factors that influence the participation by clinical pharmacists in ward rounds include pharmacy management culture, commitment to ward rounds and adequate time for ward rounds being included in workload models. The 'micro' level factors that affect the involvement of clinical pharmacists in ward rounds have not been widely explored. OBJECTIVE: Explore 'micro' level factors to gain insight into clinical pharmacists' participation in interprofessional ward rounds in inpatient settings through the lens of social cognitive theory...

OBJECTIVE: The Opioid and Naloxone Education (ONE) Program focuses on community pharmacy-based patient screening and interventions to improve population health with regard to opioid use. The purpose of this paper is to reevaluate the ONE Program performance using the RE-AIM model, in comparison to the review performed in 2019. METHODS: The program performance of the ONE Program was evaluated from January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2022 was evaluated using the five domains of the RE-AIM model...

INTRODUCTION: Noise exposure during pregnancy may affect a child's auditory system, which may disturb fetal learning and language development. We examined the impact of occupational noise exposure during pregnancy on children's language acquisition at the age of one. METHODS: A cohort study was conducted among women working in the food industry, as kindergarten teachers, musicians, dental nurses, or pharmacists who had a child aged <1 year. The analyses covered 408 mother-child pairs...

BACKGROUND: Early detection of adverse events and their management are crucial to improving anticancer treatment outcomes, and listening to patients' subjective opinions (patients' voices) can make a major contribution to improving safety management. Recent progress in deep learning technologies has enabled various new approaches for the evaluation of safety-related events based on patient-generated text data, but few studies have focused on the improvement of real-time safety monitoring for individual patients...

ChatGPT is a language model that was trained on a large dataset including medical literature. Several studies have described the performance of ChatGPT on medical exams. In this study, we examine its performance in answering factual knowledge questions regarding clinical pharmacy. Questions were obtained from a Dutch application that features multiple-choice questions to maintain a basic knowledge level for clinical pharmacists. In total, 264 clinical pharmacy-related questions were presented to ChatGPT and responses were evaluated for accuracy, concordance, quality of the substantiation, and reproducibility...

INTRODUCTION: The intricate nature of certain diseases necessitates complex medication regimens, utilization including high-cost medications, and continual vigilance to avoid potential complications. To address these exigencies, numerous healthcare institutions have instituted multidisciplinary management teams, exemplified in pharmaceutical care through Comprehensive Medication Management (CMM) programs. These programs oversee diverse facets such as patient education, medication adherence promotion, clinical monitoring, dose adjustments, and scrutiny of prescribed drug therapies...

Introduction: Optimal chronic care management is limited by low health care access and health literacy among underserved populations. We introduced clinical pharmacy services to enhance our patient-centered home model, which serves mostly Medicare/Medicaid-insured patients. Primary care providers (PCP) refer patients with uncontrolled diabetes to the pharmacist for chronic disease management between PCP appointments to bring A1c to goal under a collaborative agreement. This workflow existed before the COVID-19 pandemic and was primarily in-person visits...

IMPORTANCE: Large gaps in clinical care in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) lead to poor outcomes. OBJECTIVE: To compare the effectiveness of an electronic health record-based population health management intervention vs usual care for reducing CKD progression and improving evidence-based care in high-risk CKD. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: The Kidney Coordinated Health Management Partnership (Kidney CHAMP) was a pragmatic cluster randomized clinical trial conducted between May 2019 and July 2022 in 101 primary care practices in Western Pennsylvania...

DISCLAIMER: In an effort to expedite the publication of articles, AJHP is posting manuscripts online as soon as possible after acceptance. Accepted manuscripts have been peer-reviewed and copyedited, but are posted online before technical formatting and author proofing. These manuscripts are not the final version of record and will be replaced with the final article (formatted per AJHP style and proofed by the authors) at a later time. PURPOSE: This report describes the step-by-step process that led to expansion of ambulatory care pharmacy services at a newly established internal medicine clinic within a patient-centered medical home in North Carolina...

BACKGROUND: Pharmacists have some prescriptive authority in all fifty states through dependent and independent prescribing. Data describing the volume and characteristics of pharmacist prescribing are not widely available, and these insights are critical to gauge the impact of regulations supporting pharmacist prescriptive authority. OBJECTIVE: To identify trends in pharmacist prescribing and compare them to primary care provider (PCP) prescribing trends by analyzing e-prescriptions initiated from electronic health records systems (EHRs) from 2019 through 2022...

PURPOSE: Several allelic variants of the gene DPYD encoding dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase (DPD) are associated with impaired metabolism of the systemic fluoropyrimidine fluorouracil (5FU) and its oral prodrug, capecitabine, which elevates the risk for severe toxicity. Following a patient death related to capecitabine toxicity in which DPD deficiency was suspected, a multidisciplinary advisory panel was convened to develop an institution-wide approach to future patients planned for a systemic fluoropyrimidine...

Receipt of nebulised pentamidine in people with HIV was audited to identify if individuals were appropriately receiving nebulised pentamidine, and whether national guidelines were being followed when prophylaxis was commenced and discontinued. Of 76 people with who received nebulised pentamidine, the main indication for starting nebulised pentamidine was a co-trimoxazole adverse drug reaction. Co-trimoxazole desensitization was not attempted before starting nebulised pentamidine. The main indication for stopping nebulised pentamidine prophylaxis was when immune reconstitution occurred...