Video Transcript - Dr. Dolovich's interview - Show me the Evidence, Vol. 1, Issue 1

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My name is Lisa Dolovich and I am the Research Director and an associate professor with the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University.

The Issue: Adverse Drug Events
Adverse drug events are an enormous public health problem.  These events often lead to physician office visits, emergency department visits, admissions to hospital, problems while somebody is in the hospital and in some cases, unfortunately, even death.

Forster and his colleagues from the University of Ottawa actually found that 17 percent or almost one in five people had an adverse drug event after they were discharged from the hospital.

A Possible Solution: A Greater Role for Pharmacists
So some of the benefits of including pharmacists as part of family medicine teams are that pharmacists who are part of these teams can actually very easily become involved in helping to make sure drugs in the family practice are being used both safety and effectively, by working very closely with the physicians and other health care team members at that site.

And also, you know, working with people to help people better self-manage their conditions as it relates to the drugs that they’re using.

The Study
In my own research with my colleagues, when we worked on a project called “IMPACT” which is Integrating Medicine and Pharmacy to Advance Primary Care Therapeutics we found that pharmacists working within a primary care practice found at least one drug therapy problem in 94 percent of the patients that they assessed.

We also talked to physicians about how they felt about the pharmacists in the practice and by the end of the project the physicians actually told us, even the ones that were pretty negative, actually at the beginning, but even those as a whole the physicians really told us that they were glad the pharmacists were in the practice because that provided them with a fresh perspective.

The Impact
In trying to think about the ideal role for the Canadian pharmacist in the future I would say that it’s to really work very collaboratively with other health care team members as the drug therapy expert on the team.

I think as we think about medicine and drugs it’s becoming increasingly complex and with our population aging and using more and more drugs, I think pharmacists will hopefully be seen more and more as really a go-to member of the health care team that takes the responsibility for making sure that patients get the best outcomes from the drug that they’re taking.

More and more jurisdictions in Canada are also approving pharmacists to prescribe medications.

So, you know, pharmacists, I think, have a really important role to play in making sure that someone is on the best medication for them.