Article ID: oa.2020-0006
Polypharmacy listed in the prescription review process in the Guidelines for “the Proper Use of Drugs by the Elderly”, issued by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, has factors such as number of drugs, poor adherence and a large number of prescription medical institutions and so on. Since hospitalization is often short in acute care hospitals, it is necessary to evaluate the patient’s background and these factors in a short period to optimize prescriptions, so we analyzed the association with factors such as polypharmacy factors of the prescription optimization requiring reduction of the drug to extract the factors of concern. According to the comparative analysis results of the reduced-dose group of 76 patients and the non-reduced-drug group of 136 patients, there was no significant difference in “late elderly” and “oral administration of five or more drugs” and so on, but there were significant differences in “duplicate drugs” (p=0.012), “complicated regimens” (p=0.016), and “poor adherence” (p=0.005). This study suggested that intervening in the prescribing of patients with factors that are highly relevant to the need for drug reduction contributes to improving the work efficiency of pharmacists in acute care hospitals.
