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Media Release

September 14 2009

Doctor-pharmacist partnership reduces heart failure hospitalisation

Dr Libby Roughead If doctors and pharmacists work together to ensure people with heart failure take their medicines correctly, hospitalisations can be reduced, UniSA-led research has found.
 
The research was recently published in the American Heart Association journal, Circulation: Heart Failure, in which the research team described a collaborative model for ensuring heart failure patients take their medicine properly.
 
Study lead-author Dr Libby Roughead from UniSA’s School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences said the rate of hospitalisation was cut by 45 per cent in the first year of being part of a collaborative medicines review.
 
“If you have heart failure, getting a home visit with your pharmacist and then having a follow-up visit with your doctor about your medicines can keep you out of hospital,” Dr Roughead said.
 
The Australian-based study followed 273 heart failure patients over age 65 who underwent collaborative medicine review and compared them to 5444 controls who didn’t have their medicines reviewed.
 
As part of the review, pharmacists looked for signs of possible medication misuse including under-dosing, over-dosing and hoarding of unneeded medications from previous prescriptions which can increase the risk of accidentally taking the wrong medicine. They also looked for over-the-counter medicines and vitamins that could interact with prescription drugs.
 
During a year-long follow-up, 5.5 per cent of the people in the medication review group were hospitalised, compared to 12 per cent in the no-review group.
 
“Poor use of medications can increase costs enormously,” Dr Roughead said.
 
“This study indicates that investing in improvements in medication management can result in more cost-effective health care.”
 
Dr Roughead was last week awarded a prestigious Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.

 


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