Transcript
Pharmacy Collaboration
Ayasha Thomason
Hi, I’m Ayasha Thomason.
Ashley Kirk
I’m Ashley Kirk.
Ayasha Thomason
Today we’re going to talk about pharmacy collaboration. So each month, a pharmacy consultant comes into a nursing facility, and they make recommendations on certain things. So maybe there are residents who are on multiple medications who could be dwindled down to just a few, or maybe they are on a higher dose of a medication or a narcotic that could be reduced or an antipsychotic that maybe they don’t need. So the pharmacist will make these recommendations each month and kind of give a report to the don each month. So this is where our nurse practitioners will come in, and they’ll take that stack of recommendations, and they’ll go and take a deeper dive into that patient’s medical record, all the medications that they’re on. And by this point, our nurse practitioners are very familiar with these people. They know everything that they’re taking. They know the side effects, and they know kind of how the residents react to them. Right. Yeah. So they will go see the patient and evaluate the medications and decide if they will either continue with that recommendation or they want to maybe do a trial dose reduction and having just that documentation that, yeah, we’re going to try to reduce this based on the recommendation that the pharmacist recommended. If it doesn’t work out, we’re going to follow up in a week, and we’ll bring them back up if we need to.
Ashley Kirk
Right. It’s nice because they’re there and they can notice the little. Small, minor changes that happen on a dose reduction. So it’s nice that they’re able to. Be there and watch and monitor. That patient. Closely.
Ayasha Thomason
So this really helps reduce polypharmacy because when our patients are on multiple medications and some of them become redundant, they’re on three, four medications for hypertension. We can start trying to reduce some of that, take them off here one by one. And our nurse practitioners documentation and their progress notes shows that the facility is on top of this and that they’re really trying to work towards reducing some of these medications that these people don’t need to be on.
Ashley Kirk
Right. I mean, it helps the resident tremendously. And it also helps staff, the nursing staff, they’re not. Having to, you know, administer that many medications when they’re reducing the med. So that’s nice.