Patient welfare

Any adverse events are reported and acted on to ensure patients welfare is not compromised by the drug. Serious events are reported to regulatory authorities within a specified time and, if deemed necessary, the drug is recalled or doctors and patients are notified. 

The science of pharmacovigilance - monitoring and evaluating drug safety issues and communicating them effectively - is a vital activity of worldwide significance in the safeguarding of patient welfare and public health. Its clinical, public health and economic importance has been demonstrated, but it needs to be better understood and appreciated by politicians, the media and the public. 

Science is primarily a scholarly endeavor the practice of medicine is primarily a practical trade. Scientists try to find out more and more about the world, even if doing so is time-consuming. Medicine, in contrast, depends more on what is usefiil than on what is true. That includes the specialties of neurology and psychiatry. The important information for medicine is that which enables medical practicioners to decide how best to try to help individual sick people. Generally those decisions must be made within a limited amount of time in order to be useful. Even the decision to do nothing is a decision that affects patient welfare. When possible, medical decisions are based on scientific information, but where the science is lacking the decisions still have to be made. 

Chemical measurements have also been made on human brain tissue obtained from biopsies or from therapeutic surgery (Smith et al., 1983). Here, agonal and postmortem artifacts are not a problem. However, the tissue available is limited. Patient welfare rather than scientific utility must determine the amounts of tissue available and the anatomical sites from which it comes. 

The urgent need to enhance the safety of drug therapy shows that the medication-use cycle must change. Pharmacists as the drug therapy experts are positioned to shape their practice environments to focus attention on a critical set of priorities to enhance the medication-use cycle to better serve patient welfare and safety. 

Although patient welfare is the first priority, the personal safety of NHS staff dealing with suspected outbreaks is essential in order to minimise exposure and the risk of developing illness by instituting appropriate infection control measures immediately. 

The na/ outcomes which are changes over time in the symptoms, welfare and quality of life of patients (and their families if relevant to the context), relative to some baseline position, standard or comparator. Final outcomes are clearly measures of effectiveness. They can equivalently be defined as reductions in need. 

The production of welfare approach assumes that the final outcomes of a mental health-care intervention will be influenced ( produced ) by the nature of the services provided, the types, levels and mixes of resources employed, the social environment of the care setting and other non-resource factors. This core theme of the production of welfare model is obviously not built up from economic theory as such, but it is a logical corollary of theory and evidence from psychology, psychiatry and certain other disciplines. However, the formalization of the links between intervention characteristics, resource inputs and patient and family outcomes owes much to economic theories of cost and production relations and their... 

Economic studies should consider the costs of all the resources and services used in the process of care. In addition, the outcomes that are a consequence of the health or social care interventions evaluated need to be included. For dementia, these include the costs of hospital inpatient and out-patient care, primary and community-based health-care services, social welfare services, and care provided by voluntary agencies or by femily and friends. Ideally, a broad perspective reflecting the costs and outcomes to society should be adopted. As a minimum, the perspective of the analysis should include the costs and outcomes to key health and social care providers or funders and to patients and their families. 

Following a similar reasoning, the reader can see that when pharmaceuticals are subsidized to the extent that patients pay only half the price, the welfare loss is as shown by the hatched triangle A CD in Figure 7.1. 

It should be remembered that a practitioner prescribing an unlicensed medicine does so entirely on his own responsibility, carrying the total burden for the patient s welfare and, m the event of an adverse reaction, may be called upon to justify his actions. Under these circumstances it may be advisable for the practitioner to check his position with his medical defence union before prescribing such unlicensed products. 

Placing the welfare, safety and concerns of patients at the absolute centre of all thinking, planning and operations, and measuring the value of all activities against those nonnegotiable priorities by ... 

L D. There is always some degree of risk in clinical trials the object is to minimize the risk to the patient. The primary consideration in any clinical trial is the welfare of the subject. The safety of the drug is one objective for certain clinical trials as is the ef- 3. ficacy of the drug in other trials. 

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