Pharmacy technicians aid medication reconciliation
Wednesday September 5, 2007 -- Jason Thompson
Lauza Saulnier and Melissa White are hoping to convince other Safer Healthcare Now (SHN) teams of the benefit of using pharmacy technicians as part of the multi-disciplinary team working on medication reconciliation.
Saulnier, the chief of pharmacy services, and White, a pharmacy technician with the South-East Regional Health Authority (SERHA) in New Brunswick, are guest speakers at a SHN teleconference Sept. 12, titled Med. Red. - Using a Tech. Successful Experiences with Pharmacy Technicians in Implementing Medication Reconciliation. The teleconference is being sponsored by the Canadian Patient Safety Institute.
“The pharmacy technician assists greatly the pharmacy, nursing and medical staff and we’re able to provide the service more efficiently but also to more patients,” Saulnier says.
She adds there are a number of hospital sites across the country looking at including pharmacy technicians as part of the medication reconciliation process in specific clinical areas.
“(Pharmacy technicians) are one of the key members on our team and we need to take advantage of their expertise,” Saulnier says. “We want to ensure that by having the best resources on our team that we will then be able to expand the number of patients that will have medication reconciliation conducted when they come to a hospital.”
Saulnier says SERHA has been operating some form of medication reconciliation since 1993, long before medication reconciliation as part of SHN came along in 2005.
White says the role of the pharmacy technician is to support the delivery of medication reconciliation at admission, transfer and discharge. Once trained, the technician’s responsibility is to gather a list of medication on a designated form, find out if the patient has any drug allergies, identify the patient’s community pharmacy to obtain a drug history and prepare a medication calendar for use after discharge.
“For patients, we’ve proven that there is prevention of adverse drug events and that there is the continuity of care between the settings,” White says. “We’ve actually provided these services to more patients now that technicians have been involved.”
White says having pharmacy technicians assist in medication reconciliation also removes some of the pressure from nurses and physicians.
“From the nursing point of view, they find that there is less time needed at admission and at discharge related to medications which has increased their confidence as well,” White says. “The doctors have reduced physician time at admission and discharge related to medication and discrepancies have been identified and reconciled in a timely manner.”
Saulnier hopes by sharing some of SERHA’s experience using pharmacy technicians, other organizations who decide to follow their lead won’t have to start from scratch.
“Hopefully they will be able to use some of the tools were using, learn from the experiences we have gained over the years but most importantly, to have pharmacy technicians excited about these new roles,” she says.
For more information on the teleconference, visit www.saferhealthcarenow.ca.
