Geriatric Drug Therapy Interventions

Book excerpt: Medication costs and common drug-related problems, such as misapplication of therapy, medication misuse, and adverse effects, can often be avoided or reduced. Geriatric Drug Therapy Interventions will help you get better outcomes with your patients as it points out pitfalls to avoid and provides you with logical principles for administering drug therapy. Offering guidelines, advice, and gentle reminders, this book shows you the importance of properly documenting patient problems and of considering the entire medical history of your patients. It also helps you perform fall and psychoactive drug risk assessments and address under-recognized and undertreated problems such as malnutrition, depression, sensory deficits, anemia, osteoporosis, and pressure ulcers.As Geriatric Drug Therapy Interventions clarifies, increased consultant pharmacist involvement in comprehensive pharmaceutical services results in the reduction of drug-related problems and medication-associated costs with long-term care patients. Using this book's helpful and substantive interventions, you can improve clinical, economic, and humanistic outcomes in your practice. For this purpose, Geriatric Drug Therapy Interventions discusses: a study designed to teach pharmacy students to identify, document, solve, and prevent medication-related problems providing patient-focused care and assuming responsibility for patient outcomes reimbursing pharmacists for performing cognitive service and cost-savings activities how the prevalence of drug-related problems that influence the need for hospital and nursing home admissions increases with age reasons for patient noncompliance NSAID-associated gastritis, gastrointestinal bleeding, drug-induced delirium, incontinence, and constipation why the advent of managed care does not bode well for the overall health outcomes of the elderlyPharmacists, physicians, and other health care providers can't control all aspects of drug use, but there are many practical steps you can take to help your patients use their prescriptions appropriately. Geriatric Drug Therapy Interventions will help you monitor the efficacy of drug therapy, guide patients who are exasperated with being poked, prodded, and barraged with medications, and work together to develop therapy patterns and schedules that are effective and comfortable.