BACKGROUND Current model of medication supply to Residential Aged Care Facilities (RACFs) in Australia is dependent on paper-based prescriptions. This study is aimed at assessing the use of a centralized medication chart as a prescription-less model for supplying medications to RACFs. METHODS Two separate focus groups were conducted with general practitioners (GPs) and pharmacists, and anothe...

The number of people aged 65 years and older in the United States is increasing. This age group consumes 30% of all prescription drugs. Many elderly people require assistance from caregivers in taking their medication. Medication administration errors can result if caregivers cannot remember to give the medications or do not understand how to give them. This study aims to determine a more effec...

INTRODUCTION Preterm birth is associated with increased risk of asthma-like symptoms and purchase of prescription asthma medication in childhood. We investigated whether this association persists into adulthood and whether it is affected by accounting for neonatal respiratory morbidity (acute respiratory disease and bronchopulmonary dysplasia). METHODS A national cohort of all infants born in...

BACKGROUND Medication errors are common but most often preventable events in any health care setup. Studies on medication errors involving chemotherapeutic drugs are limited. OBJECTIVE We studied three aspects of medication errors - prescription, transcription and administration errors in 500 cancer patients who received ambulatory cancer chemotherapy at a resource limited setting government ...

BACKGROUND Medication nonadherence is widespread, but there are few efficient means of detecting medication nonadherence at the point of care. Visit-to-visit variability in clinical biomarkers has shown inconsistent efficiency to predict medication adherence. OBJECTIVE To examine the performance of visit-to-visit variability (VVV) of hemoglobin A1c to predict nonadherence to antidiabetic medi...

OBJECTIVES To examine older adults' perspectives regarding managing sleep problems through selection and use of non-prescription sleep aids, and the role of pharmacists. METHODS Telephone interviews were conducted from May to June 2015 with 116 individuals aged ≥60 years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Participants reported in a previous survey to have used at least one non-prescription sleep ai...

In the United States, 80 million adults have substantial difficulties with reading,1 and only 12% of adults are considered proficient in health literacy.2 Approximately 1.5 million adverse drug events occur each year,3 resulting in 117,000 hospitalizations annually at significant human and financial cost.4 Prescription standards and recommendations exist,5,6 but are not universally adopted. Cle...

PURPOSE Heart failure prevalence is increasing in older adults, and polypharmacy is a major problem in this population. We compared medication regimen complexity using the validated patient-level Medication Regimen Complexity Index (pMRCI) tool in "young-old" (60-74 years) versus "old-old" (75-89 years) patients with heart failure. We also compared pMRCI between patients with ischemic cardiomyo...

BACKGROUND UK Government policy increasingly encourages self-care of minor illnesses, including self-medication. Analgesics constitute a quarter of UK over-the-counter medicines sales, but concerns have been expressed about their potential for inappropriate use. OBJECTIVES To estimate the prevalence of recent use of non-prescription analgesics in Scotland, to describe by whom they are used, a...