Ginger Lemay, PharmD, CDOE  CommunIty pharmaCIStS are often the first point of contact for patients with health-related and medication questions. The 2007 Wilson Rx Pharmacy Customer Satisfaction Survey reports that the average pharmacy customer visits their pharmacy an average of two to three times per month, which is greater than ten times the number of times they visit their primary care ph...

This paper outlines the motivation for and the development of a medication management information resource for Australian ethnic minority informal caregivers of people living with dementia. The aim of this project is to enable ethnic minority informal caregivers to safely and effectively manage medications for their care recipient living with dementia in the community setting. A large number of...

BACKGROUND Medication errors are often involved in reported adverse events. Drug therapy, prescribed by physicians, is mostly carried out by nurses, who are expected to master all aspects of medication. Research has revealed the need for improved knowledge in drug dose calculation, and medication knowledge as a whole is poorly investigated. The purpose of this survey was to study registered nur...

OBJECTIVES To propose a theoretical construct of family caregiver skills in effective medication management for home hospice patients. METHODS Semistructured face-to-face interviews were conducted with 22 hospice providers (14 nurses, 4 physicians, and 4 social workers) and 23 family caregivers (10 daughters, 4 wives, 2 husbands, and 7 others) of elderly patients (>or=60 years old) who were r...

Medication reconciliation (MR) is a process that seeks to assure that the medications a patient is supposed to take are the same as what they are actually taking. We have developed a method in which medication information (consisting of both coded data and narrative text) is extracted from twelve sources from two clinical information systems and assembled into a chronological sequence of medica...

An interim update of the chapter titled Pharmacologic Management of Type 2 Diabetes in the 2013 Clinical Practice Guidelines was recently published in Canadian Journal of Diabetes; it incorporates the sodium glucose linked transporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitor class (1). Since the publication of the update, another SGLT2 inhibitor has received notice of compliance from Health Canada (2). The article’...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Considering the paucity of regional data, this study was designed to investigate the prevalence of post-operative pain and determine if there exists any correlation between the intensity of post-operative pain and patient's level of satisfaction with their pain management after inpatient abdominal surgery at an academic tertiary care government centre. METHODS Pain intensi...

Medication errors in the perioperative setting can result in patient morbidity and mortality. The AORN "Recommended practices for medication safety" provide guidance to perioperative nurses in developing, implementing, and evaluating safe medication use practices. These practices include recognizing risk points in the medication use process, collaborating with pharmacy staff members, conducting...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the general medicines management issues for people with dementia living in the community. This review has three aims: firstly to explore and evaluate the international literature on how people with dementia manage medication; assess understanding of medicines management from an informal carers perspective; and lastly to understand the role that healthcare profes...