February has been an important month for not only pre-professional students, but for pharmacists and their patients as well. This month signifies a Medication Adherence Team Challenge, Script Your Future. This challenge entails going beyond normal boundaries and engaging the professional pharmacy students to interact with health care professionals, specifically pharmacists, and their patients to inform communities in the importance of medical adherence. Medical adherence is a patients lack of following directions regarding the frequency, dosage, or specific times one should take their medicine. This could be caused by misconstrues, laziness, age, low income, etc. The disregard a patient may have can cause serious, hospital related incidents. This nationwide campaign in informing others about this is dire because it is a growing problem. These statistics from Epill.com and Intelecare.com are frightening but are a call to action:

• About 50% of the 2 billion prescriptions filled each year are not taken correctly
• 1/3 of patients take all their medicine, 1/3 take some, 1/3 don’t take any at all (Rx prescription never filled)
• 15% of all hospital visits ($47 billion/annually) are due to medication non-adherence
• 125,000 deaths annually are the result of non-adherence

The campaign’s main goal is to have pharmacists educate professional students on this existing problem and encouraging greater engagement with their patients so all questions can be asked and pre-cautions can be taken.  The pharmacy students from UT are constantly involved with the community regarding such matters. For example, a few weeks ago I volunteered at a Kroger Pharmacy in which the professional students measured blood glucose and blood pressure’s of anyone interested that was willing to give 5 minutes of their time. If a risk or possibility of a risk was brought to their attention, communication was brought up immediately on in order to prevent something serious in the future. This is done every Saturday. But more specifically, the pharmacy students will advise and answer any questions regarding medical adherence next Wednesday, February 27th 9:00-11:00a.m. at the Sylvania Senior Center.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2013 at 3:28 am and is filed under Uncategorized.
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