Pharmaceutical care interventions at the Rehabilitation Hospital Karin Grech

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To record the type and number of interventions made by pharmacists, to document intervention outcome and to record physicians’ acceptance of pharmacists’ recommendations. METHOD: A retrospective study was undertaken to collect data about patients who received recommendations by pharmacists during their hospital stay at the Rehabilitation Hospital Karin Grech (RHKG). This study was carried out over a 12-week period. Five hundred patient profiles were selected randomly from a sample of 1500 profiles. Analysis of data was carried out using Microsoft Office Excel® 2010 and SPSS® Version 20. KEY FINDINGS: Out of 500 patients, 323 (64.6%) received pharmacist recommendations. Out of these patients, 27% were male (n=87) and 73% were female (n=236), and the average age was 80.3 years. Patients’ mean number of long term medications was 8.59 with a median of 8. ‘Orthopaedic’ conditions were the most common reason for admission, representing almost one third of all reasons for admission (n=96, 29.7%), followed by ‘cardiac’ conditions (n=62, 19.1%). A total of 1069 valid recommendations were identified in this study. ‘Need for additional drug’ was the most common type of pharmacists’ recommendation. Of the 1069 recommendations, 77% were accepted by physicians (n=823), 19.2% were not accepted (n=212) and 3.5% could not be evaluated for acceptance (n=34). Recommendations classified as ‘need for monitoring’ had the highest percentage of acceptance (89.9%). CONCLUSION: The goal of this study was to evaluate the recommendations made by pharmacists in the care of elderly patients. Pharmacists made many recommendations that affect the care of hospitalised patients with the majority of recommendations being accepted by physicians. The study confirms the need for the currently offered clinical pharmacy service to improve patient care.