Medical Inspection – Health Blog

Previous work suggests that prescription data­bases are an accurate means of identifying drugs dispensed to individual patients. One study has demonstrated good agreement between computerized prescription records and written prescription records from a medical clinic. Information in prescription databases is also similar to that obtained from self-administered medication-history questionnaires. However, previous work suggests that medication [...]

The results of the current study suggest that pharmacists may obtain more complete histories of a patient’s use of prescription medication than other health care workers. However, because the variability in the data was large, the difference was not statistically significant. Since taking medication histories is a focus of pharmaceutical care, pharmacists may spend more time [...]

Of the charts for 52 patients randomly selected from the Medical Records Department list, 22 (42%) patients were seen by a clinical pharmacist during their admis­sion, and medication-history information for 6 (27%) of these 22 patients was obtained from PharmaNet. From the charts for 66 patients in total (52 from the hospital’s Medical Records Department [...]

This study was carried out at St Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, a 500-bed teaching institution, with 48 of these beds allocated to general medicine and another 11 to geriatric medicine. A list of patients over the age of 65 years admitted to St Paul’s Hospital for at least 3 days between November 1, [...]

INTRODUCTION To prescribe safely, physicians must know which medications their patients are using. However, medication histories documented in hospital medical records are often inaccurate, and these inaccuracies may be the source of drug-related problems. Since most adverse drug events are avoidable, their prevention has become a high priority for health care professionals. Because advancing age [...]

Limited evidence is currently available to evaluate the clinical efficacy and safety of vancomycin by continuous infusion relative to conventional intermittent infusion. Published trials were highly heterogeneous in terms of study design, dosing regimens, and serum monitoring strategies, and evaluated a vast array of outcomes that rendered comparison across trials difficult. Although both adult and [...]

Level II-3 Evidence Three studies with level II-3 evidence (i.e., evidence from multiple time series with or without intervention or dramatic results in uncontrolled experiments) were identified. All three studies were retrospective. One involved a pediatric popula­tion and 2 involved adult patients. The concentration of vancomycin in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma was evaluated in [...]