Learning Objectives: Mortality has been reported to be as high as 50% in patients presenting to the emergency department (ED) with sepsis, severe sepsis, or septic shock. The clinical pharmacist in the ED plays an instrumental role in providing appropriate dosing and empiric therapy recommendations for management of these patients. The Surviving Sepsis Campaign Guidelines recommend administrati...

BACKGROUND Traditional systems of managing repeat prescribing have been criticised for their lack of clinical and administrative controls. AIM To compare a community pharmacist-managed repeat prescribing system with established methods of managing repeat prescribing. METHOD A randomised controlled intervention study (19 general medical practices, 3074 patients, 62 community pharmacists). Pa...

UNLABELLED The aim of the study was to use a clinical pharmacist in order to improve the medication of patients in a geriatric hospital unit. The hospital had no experience of using a clinical pharmacist before. METHODS A clinical pharmacist participated in the therapeutic team for 27 days during a 4-year period. Drug-related problems were recorded prospectively and discussed before and at th...

INTRODUCTION Pneumonia impacts over four million people annually and is the leading cause of infectious disease-related hospitalization and mortality in the United States. Appropriate empiric antimicrobial therapy decreases hospital length of stay and improves mortality. The objective of our study was to test the hypothesis that the presence of an emergency medicine (EM) clinical pharmacist imp...

Pharmacists are expected to deliver pharmaceutical care, that is, to accept responsibility for patients' well-being by ensuring optimum outcomes of drug therapy. Therefore, their performance must be evaluated based on this expectation. The template should be a useful tool for assessing the extent to which clinical pharmacists' performance meets predefined practice standards. Its adaptability wi...

The Capturing Outcomes of Clinical Activities Performed by a Rounding Pharmacist Practicing in a Team Environment (COLLABORATE) study was a controlled clinical trial that demonstrated the beneficial effect of team-based care by a clinical pharmacist on process-of-care and patient outcomes in hospital patients cared for by internal and family medicine teams. During the course of the study, sever...

BACKGROUND A transition from one health care setting to another increases the risk of medication errors. Several strategies have been applied to improve care transitions and reduce adverse clinical outcomes. Pharmacist intervention during and after hospitalization has been frequently studied and show a variable effect on these outcomes. OBJECTIVE To identify the components of pharmacist inter...

PURPOSE To evaluate the effect of sustained clinical pharmacist interventions involving elderly outpatients with polypharmacy and their primary physicians. PATIENTS AND METHODS Randomized, controlled trial of 208 patients aged 65 years or older with polypharmacy (> or = 5 chronic medications) from a general medicine clinic of a Veterans Affairs Medical Center. A clinical pharmacist met with i...

OBJECTIVES To examine the effects of computerized requests for pharmacist-to-dose (PTD), an advanced clinical decision support tool for dosing guidance, on antimicrobial therapy with vancomycin and aminoglycosides, describe PTD request utilization, and identify factors that may prolong this process. DESIGN A retrospective review was conducted of patients hospitalized from Jan 2004 to Jun 2006...