Reconciliation of the medication in community pharmacy

Introduction: Proper usage of medicines is the main objective of the medication reconciliation. It consists of a method to review systematically the patient medicine intakes to guarantee their safety. 

Objectives: This paper aims to demonstrate the correlation between failure in treatment reconciliation and patient changes in the different care levels. 

Methods: A multisite descriptive pilot study was developed in six pharmacies from Huelva for three months. Twenty nine patients’ ordinary pharmacological treatments were compared to new prescribed treatments. BOT PLUS medicine database, Dader method and Stopp-Start criteria were used in the decision making process to analyze data. 

Results: A 37.9% patients show discrepancies in their pharmacological treatments, mainly those who come from a hospital discharge (36.4%) and those who come from specialists (45.5%).

Heart disease patients showed the highest discrepancies, followed by kidney disease patients. Discrepancies were due to double prescription for the same pathology (36.4%) and non treatment diseases detection (27.3%). Additionally, mistakes in treatment (18.2%) and mistakes in dosage prescription (9.1%) were observed. As a consequence, 81.8% were sent back to receive medical attention.

Discussion: As a summary, discrepancies in pharmacological treatments are found to be very high when patients change care levels. Pharmacist role to avoid these discrepancies is key, since they are the last sanitary professional in contact with the patient before medicines intake.