Benefit of a Collaborative Approach to Improve the Quality of Medicines Use in Elderly Inpatients

Université Catholique de Louvain

Status and phase

Completed

Phase 4

Conditions

Frail Elderly Inpatient

Treatments

Behavioral: Pharmaceutical care

Study type

Interventional

Funder types

Other

Identifiers

NCT00279656

om050-40/2003

Details and patient eligibility

About

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of a collaborative approach (geriatric care involving the collaboration with a clinical pharmacist) to optimize the prescription of medicines for elderly inpatients.

Full description

Widespread evidence reveals frequent inadequate use of medicines in elderly patients. This includes inappropriate prescribing (overuse, underuse, misuse) that can lead to adverse drug events and drug-related admissions to hospital. In addition, when a patient is transferred from acute care settings to ambulatory care settings, discrepancies in medicines used often occur and can be hazardous.

Despite this, only limited data exist on the effectiveness of optimization strategies targeted at frail elderly inpatients.

Comparison: elderly inpatients receiving geriatric evaluation and management (GEM) care versus elderly inpatients receiving pharmaceutical care in addition to GEM care.

Sex

All

Ages

70+ years old

Volunteers

No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

Patient admitted on the acute geriatric unit of the university teaching hospital Mont-Godinne, Belgium

Exclusion criteria

a terminal illness and life expectancy of less than 3 month
expected length of stay of 2 days or less
transfer from another unit where the patient had already been cared for by a GEM team
refusal to participate
inclusion during previous admission
no time for the clinical pharmacist to compound the abstracted chart within 3 days of admission