Public health interest of community pharmacist and home care nurses collaboration in the realization of weekly pillboxes: A quantitative observational cross-sectional study

Introduction:
Medication errors and/or non-compliance can jeopardize patients’ safety. This risk can be attributed to the patient self-medication and/or her/his family and friends who may not ensure optimal follow-up of medication. Caregivers could be a risk too if she/he does not prepare the medication in accordance with the prescribed treatment due to lack of time or distraction. This study analyzes the practice of preparing weekly pillboxes to mitigate the potential risk of medication errors and/or non-compliance.

Methodology:

We surveyed Belgian community pharmacists and nurses in the preparation of weekly pillboxes. We study their potential interest in being involved together in a collaboration. The respective skills of these two stakeholders would be used to achieve a common goal, understand a patient's treatment in its entirety to reduce the risk of medication errors and the resulting drug-related iatrogeny. In practice, interprofessional collaboration in the health care setting is not consistently delivered by all professions, a significant disparity between the home care nurse and the community pharmacists may be a barrier to efficient collaboration.

Result:

We describe the professional profile and collaboration interest of home care nurse and pharmacist. The added value of the collaboration was assessed by previous publication and data on drugs compliance and medication error.It was established that 58.5% of the nurses participating in the study would find it useful to set up collaborations with community pharmacist. The responses to the open-ended question about home care nurses' views on working with the community pharmacist were categorized to highlight the most relevant arguments. It has been calculated that 58.2% of home care nurses would be in favor of this collaboration. This approval by home care nurses is justified in half of the cases by the fact that the community pharmacist would have better knowledge of drugs (drug interactions and generics). The difference of 0.3% with the percentage quoted in the previous paragraph is explained by the fact that 8.8% of the participants did not give their opinion. There are 32.7% of home care nurses who are opposed to the establishment of these collaborations with the community pharmacist. The main reason for this refusal is that some home care nurses feel that discussions about a patient's medication should be done only with the doctor. For them, this is not the responsibility of the community pharmacist.

Conclusion:

Two main things could be improved with this collaboration. First, home care nurses' knowledge about drugs would be constantly updated and optimized. Home care nurses also believe that this would ensure better patient care if the community pharmacist had a role to play in this task. It would also have an impact on their time and workload.