Pharmaceutical Care in Community-based Integrated Care Wards:

Efforts to Optimize and Evaluate the Provision of Drug Therapy

Abstract

Regular medication reviews have been recommended for elderly patients on multiple drug therapies. Pharmaceutical care, which includes medication reviews, is very important in community-based care wards with a large number of elderly inpatients. However, little information is available regarding pharmaceutical care in these wards. Therefore, we conducted a survey to evaluate the effectiveness of the pharmaceutical care intervention provided in the wards. A retrospective study was performed from April 2019 to March 2020. When pharmaceutical care was performed during a patient’s hospital stay, we categorized the problem, purpose of the intervention, intervention method and an evaluation of its effectiveness in each case. The effectiveness of pharmaceutical care was assessed by the ratio of cases in which the results of the intervention were judged to be effective in all intervention cases. There were 341patients in the study. We provided intervention to 107 patients (31％) in 196 instances. Intervention was shown to be effective in 95％ of all cases. The implementation of pharmaceutical care helped to optimize the pharmacotherapy provided and contribute to the maintenance and improvement of patients’ quality of life.