Untitled Quiz

Clinical Pharmacy

• Defined as the area of pharmacy focused on the science and practice of rational medication use.
• A healthcare science that optimizes medication therapy, and promotes health, wellness, and disease prevention.

Clinical Duties

• Prescription monitoring
• Prescribing advice to medical and nursing staff
• Medication errors and adverse drug reaction reporting
• Medication history-taking and medicines reconciliation
• Patient education and counselling
• Pharmacokinetics and therapeutic drug level monitoring
• Personalised medicine
• Education and training
• Medicines formularies
• Clinical outcomes
• Professional and clinical audit

Prescription Monitoring

• Reviews prescriptions to identify medication dosing errors, appropriate administration routes, drug interactions, and other potential problems
• Patients are questioned about their medication histories, including allergies, intolerances, treatment efficacy , side-effects and adverse reactions.

Prescribing Advice to Medical and Nursing Staff

• Provides support with medicine choice and dosage
• Explains methods of administration
• Outlines potential side effects
• Discusses potential interactions
• Offers guidance on monitoring requirements

Medication Errors and Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting

• Adverse drug events are a significant issue with medication errors causing roughly 25% of reported incidents impacting patient safety.
• Pharmacists have an important role in detecting and managing ADRs.
• The Yellow Card Scheme allows pharmacists and other healthcare professionals to submit reports of suspected adverse drug reactions.

Patient Education and Counselling

• Important component of clinical pharmacy for patients to understand their medicines and how to take them.
• Aims to empower patients to actively participate in managing their care.
• Helps to improve patient knowledge of their treatment and adherence.

Medication History-taking and Reconciliation

• Pharmacists and are often more accurate taking and recording medical histories than other clinicians on admission.
• Reconciliation involves compiling and comparing medication information from various sources to create a complete and up-to-date summary to compare to hospital records.

Principles in Medicine Use

• Medicines should be used when they are necessary
• Weighing benefits and risks of using a drug

Patient Compliance (Adherence)

• Patient compliance, or adherence, is the degree to which patients follow treatment recommendations.
• Low compliance rates occur frequently with long-term conditions.
• Poor compliance can result in increased healthcare costs and potentially negative outcomes.

Clinical Outcomes

• Evaluation of the success and quality of medical care.
• Standardised mortality rates can be a measure to asses overall healthcare organisation success.
• Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) are used to gauge satisfaction levels of patients with healthcare providers.

Professional and Clinical Audit

• An audit involves assessing clinical practices, identifying areas for improvement, and implementing changes to enhance quality of care.
• Clinical pharmacists can play a role in various audits, examining specific services, treatments or interventions.

Personlised Medicine

• Tailoring treatments based on individual patient needs.
• Use of biological markers rather than simple clinical outcomes.
• Employing pharmacogenetics for understanding how patients respond to drugs.

Integrated Medicines Management

• Bringing together several elements of clinical pharmacy for better patient care at different stages of patient stay (e.g. admission, monitoring, counselling/discharge).
• Demonstrated improvements include reduced length of stay, reduced readmission rates, and positive clinical outcomes.

Pharmacokinetics and Therapeutic Drug Level Monitoring

• Understanding how drugs are processed in patients for tailored dosing.
• Important for situations like different ages, kidney or liver impairment.
• Drug interactions and potential side effects might be predicted or detected.
• Therapeutic drug level monitoring can help treat patients safely.

Education and Training

• Recognises the importance for clinical pharmacists to participate in and conduct education for other health care professionals and in postgraduate courses.
• The expanded roles of clinical pharmacists in the hospital setting require training and postgraduate education for effective care.

Medicines Formularies

• Pharmacists contribute to formulary development.
• A formulary is a list of recommended medicines or drugs for specific patient populations.
• Formulaires are used to ensure that prescribed medicines follow recognised guidelines, are safe, and effective for individuals.