Pharmacy preparation patient information

Functions of those services tend to center around providing prepared drug information documents (e.g., patient information sheets) and answering specific medication-related questions. These are seldom moneymaking operations, but are often provided as a service to attract customers to a pharmacy or as a public service. 

Upon receipt of a request from a prescriber for a pharmacy preparation, the pharmacist must decide whether the request is appropriate and reasonable, and judge the level of risk associated with proceeding with the request. The pharmacist must also consider the risks of not supplying a medicine which may lead to the patient not receiving treatment. Further discussion with the medical team may be needed. This chapter approaches the risk assessment of the prescription in a structured way, referring to procedures and forms from different countries. The assessment also includes the feasibility of producing a preparation of appropriate pharmaceutical quality and with all necessary clinical information. 

Informing the patient about the nature of pharmacy preparations is not yet common practice in many countries. In the UK patient leaflets on this topic are available [88]. They explain both the preparation in the pharmacy and off label prescribing of licensed medicinal products. Both situations have in common that physician and pharmacist will of course act according to disease-specific professional guidelines or following a documented risk assessment. 

Product files for pharmacy preparations are described in Sect. 33.8. National formularies such as FNA (see Sect. 39.4.5) and NRF (see Sect. 39.4.2) entail the product and process design of a large number of standard pharmacy preparations. These formularies contain the description of the formulations and method of preparation, as well as elaborate elucidations on them. Many of these elucidations reflect the QbD ideas about documentation of the design process, friformatimi about product quality, efficacy, and safety is published in those formularies or in other clearly related sources information leaflets for the patient or clinical informatimi booklets for physicians. 

In the pharmacy, shelf life is often only based on a specific temperature. For licensed medicines shelf life may be traced from the product information by the manufacturer or investigated by the pharmacist for pharmacy preparations. Many situations in practice however require stability data at different temperatures, different concentrations, solvents or containers. A justified extension of a shelf life could be very helpful for the patient or the pharmacy s logistics as well as saving a lot of money. 

When a medicine is developed, the requirements of the patient are translated into an actual product (see Chap. 17). The qualitative and quantitative composition are chosen, as well as the pharmaceutical dosage form, the preparation method, the container and the accompanying information for the patient. Pharmacy preparations should have a pharmacotherapeutic as well as technically sotmd product design. Formulation, preparation method, container and labelling have to meet the relevant requirements. 

The product file should also include information for the patient or his caregiver. In many countries national laws prescribe what information should be given about pharmacy preparations. If available, a patient information leaflet on the product is developed and included in the file. See Sects. 37.3 and 37.4 for more information. 

For the diclofenac sodium suppositories 12.5 mg, understandable information for the patient about how to use the product should be available, as well as information about the dosage, the desired effect and the possible side effects of the product etcetera. (However, be aware that this an example. In some cotmtries it is not permitted to claim a therapeutic effect for a pharmacy preparation, this being reserved for licensed products). 

First, FDA has been conducting continuing research into how much and what kind of information patienfs gef about their prescriptions from pharmacies and physicians offices. Dafa from fhe lasf four patient surveys that have been conducted since 1992 are on FDA s website at www.fda.gov/cder/ddmac/research.htm. FDA has also completed research on how men and women perceive benefits and risks in patient labeling as a fxmc-tion of how the information is commxmicated. FDA hopes to use these data to better communicate prescription medication information and is preparing papers for publication based on e data from this study. 

Many medical and pharmacy information resources can be accessed efficiently via the Internet (including information that can be used at the point of care), such as practice guidelines, tertiary references, and governmental/regulatory information. High-quality graphics are plentiful on the Internet and can benefit pharmacists in both patient education and preparation of presentations. Using multimedia resources with patients should improve their retention and... 

In clinical applications, the best recommendation for testing available applications would be to use a case-based methodology. We recommend that five or six complicated cases, which would represent a cross section of the patient population served by the pharmacy, be used to test the application. In this way, the clinician will see how the application performs throughout an entire care process and avoid the power path demonstration. In this information age, selecting clinical software is an extremely important task. The explosion of capabilities offered by the Internet can make the selection process both exciting and confusing. A careful analysis of options will usually be rewarded by better results, but wary buyers need to prepare themselves to revisit the marketplace more frequently than they might have in the past to identify innovative alternatives. 

A pharmacy technician is an individual who assists in pharmacy activities that do not require the professional judgment of a pharmacist. For example, pharmacy technicians may accept orders from patients, prepare labels, enter drug information into the pharmacy s computer system, and retrieve medications from inventory. As pharmacists assume an increasing number of clinical roles, pharmacy technicians are taking more and more responsibility for distributive functions in pharmacies in all settings. 

The NLM has brought about important changes to pharmacy practice and research. By searching MEDLINE and its other databases, pharmacists, pharmacy researchers, and pharmacy students can find answers to clinical questions, seek help in decision making, obtain information to support research, expand their knowledge on a certain drug topic, and explore and obtain available data to prepare educational tools for colleagues, students, patients, and consumers. 

Suppose you re a worker in a hospital pharmacy lab and you must prepare a salt solution that matches the salt concentration of a patient s blood. You need to measure things carefully. Blood is a dilute salt solution, but the term dilute gives only qualitative information. In this case, you need a quantitative concentration unit. 

Today, at least in Europe, an increasing number of patients are provided with health care services at home (Hutchinson and Graham, 1998). Such services include supply of home parenteral nutrition (HPN), home dialysis, i.v., antibiotic therapy at home, and patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) (Hutchinson and Graham, 1998 Hutchinson 1998). Standard bags of TPN are prepared in certain hospital pharmacies, sealed into a dark-colored outer plastic bag, and stored in a refrigerator for several weeks (Hutchinson, 1998). Information on correct storage and administration of TPN preparations at home should be provided by the pharmacist and health care personnel involved, with a focus also on the protective effect of the outer colored bag. 

Pharmacy Technician Most pharmacists rely on pharmacy technicians to prepare the proper medications to fill prescriptions. These technicians read patient charts and prescriptions in order to prepare the proper concentration, or dose, of medication that is to be administered to patients. For more information on chemistry careers, visit glencoe.com. 

When a pharmacist regularly produces a specific preparation for an individual patient, a better substantiation of the design quality is necessary. Both literature and experimental research may provide extra information about the pharmacotherapy and about pharmaceutical properties such as homogeneity, stability microbiological quality, compatibility, tolerability, and taste. For this, the pharmacist may use data from other pharmacies as well. Furthermore, more specific in-process controls may be added to the preparation process. An end control (usually non-destructive) by the operator is required for every batch, as well as a more specific validation of the preparation method. 

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