Pharmaceutical News 2.0

Have you ever received a hospital bill and wondered why the medications you were given during your stay seemed to cost more than the same medications purchased from your community pharmacy?

There are many reasons for that. First, patients who are treated in hospitals tend to be sicker, often requiring expensive and intensive therapy for critical conditions.

The medications you receive in a hospital are also accompanied by a heavy dose of round-the-clock expert care. A dedicated team of physicians and pharmacists continually monitors and adjusts your medications to help you get better.

This close attention to how your body reacts to all the medications you are receiving is an important part of hospital care. The prescription drug warfarin is an example of the importance of monitoring. Although this is an inexpensive blood thinner, hospital patients who take warfarin daily must be monitored by a pharmacist to make sure that their blood doesn’t get too thin. Likewise, nonprescription medicines like aspirin can cause real problems when paired with other medications while you are hospitalized.

Read the rest of this article on safe medication use.

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Safe medication practices promote patient safety, enhance the results of medication use and reduce liability loss. To achieve these goals, the following principles are offered to assist physicians to form effective therapeutic partnerships with their patients. The global intent of these principles is to identify and address actions that have been shown by experience and numerous studies to be associated with the decreased risk of undesired effects.

In an effective therapeutic partnership, the physician’s contribution is to prescribe the appropriate medication and to educate the patient about its use. The patient’s contribution is to take medications according to instructions and to re p o rt back to the physician both the positive and negative effects. (Pharmacists and nurses also have an important role in the therapeutic partnership. The focus of these principles, however, is on the relationship between the knowledgeable physician and the informed patient.)

Read the rest of this document here (PDF).

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