Pharmacists working in the intensive care unit (ICU) of Saiseikai Yokohamashi Tobu Hospital are mainly responsible for managing drug stocks,providing drug information to other medical staff,educating them on rational drug therapy,and providing pharmaceutical care to patients.Based on rates of inappropriate prescriptions,those that pharmacists should make inquiries to doctors about,we retrospectively investigated the contribution of pharmacists in this respect between before and after they started working in the ICU,and made a comparison.In addition,we evaluated whether pharmacists contribute to optimizing prescriptions and medical safety management.
To do this,a pharmacist in the ICU checked 4,073 prescriptions for injections issued for the 4 months before pharmacists joined the ICU team and 5,150 prescriptions issued for the 4 months after they joined it.For the former,6.41% of prescriptions required inquiries to be made whereas 1.90% of those for the latter needed inquiries,which amounted to a significant decrease in the pharmacist inquiry rate of 70.3%.We also compared problems with prescriptions before and after pharmacists’joined the ICU.After pharmacists started working there,there were significant decreases in the rates for prescription problems such as inappropriate dosage,injection speed,injection incompatibility,and administration dosage form,of 88.4 %,77.7%,91.4% and 42.3%,respectively.
Our findings suggested that having pharmacists in the ICU contributes to optimizing prescriptions and enhancing medical safety.
