Adverse drug events (ADE) are a leading cause of injury and death in healthcare. Enhanced communication and better medication histories are essential to preventing ADEs. 67% of patients’ medication histories have one or more errors and up to 46% of medication errors occur during prescription at patient admission or discharge. Erroneous medication histories can lead to discontinuity of therapy, recommencement of discontinued medicines, inappropriate therapy, and failure to detect a drug related problem. Up to 27% of hospital prescribing errors are attributable to inaccurate or incomplete medication histories on admission to hospital with the omission of a regular medicine being the most common error. Older patients (≥ 65 years) and those taking multiple medications experience a higher incidence of errors.
The Case for Pharmacist Involvement
Due to the chronic and complex nature of geriatric syndromes in older adults, a multidisciplinary team approach is pivotal to providing tailored, high‐quality patient care that can reduce ED revisits, mortality, and functional decline of older adults.
Prior ED Studies have shown that having pharmacists and technicians perform medication reconciliations reduced medication history errors and resultant medication order errors by over 80%. Early pharmacist-led medication review in the ED can decrease odds of admission, hospital length of stay, and unplanned hospitalizations.
If ED-based pharmacy resources are available, your workflows can be customized for an integrated interprofessional team model that will benefit older patients in the ED.