March 13 , 2006, The Brantford Expositor

Drug booklet helps seniors stay safe

Vincent Ball
Expositor Staff/ Brantford

It's a small booklet that can have a huge impact on the health care of senior citizens.

Foramlly called a safe medication record, it is a booklet that can easily fit in most purses or even a wallet.

Distributed free of charge to seniors by Brant County pharmacists, the booklet lists each medication a person is taking. No senior should be without it, local health care professionals say.

Each year, up to 25 percent of hospital emergency-related admissions in people over 50 are associaited with medication issues.

EMERGENCY ROOM

"We have a lot of elderly people coming into the emergecy room on a regular basis and they could be coming in for any number of reasons," said Dr. Gene Jarrell, emergency room medical director for the Brant Community Healthcare System. "They come in and a lot of the time they don't know all of the medications they are on.

"People are pretty good about talking about their illnesses, but remembering all their medication is a different story."

In many cases, people have been taking a drug for a long time. So long that they don't even consider it medication anymore and forget about it.

That can cause all kinds of problems for emergency room doctors, who must try to determine what medications a patient is on and how best to help the person. A mistake could lead to all kinds of problems.

"We spend a lot of time calling pharmacists," Jarrell said. "And you have to remember, not all of them are open 24-7. After hours it can be really difficult."

At the same time, pharmacists often call the emergency room to follow up on prescriptions written by the hospital doctors. "We'll give the patient something and then we'll get a phone call from the pharmacy pointing out that the medication we've prescribed conflicts with something that the patient is already on," Jarrell said. "When that happens, we have to come up with something else."

A booklet, which lists all of a patient's medications, makes the situation a lot safer for the patient and much easier for the physician. "It gives us a good starting point," Jarrell said.

The initiative has been lead by a group called the Brant County Seamless Care Task Force, which includes representatives from the Brant County Health Unit, Brant County Medical Association, Brant County Pharmacists Association, Brant Community Healthcare System and Canada's Research Based Pharmaceutical Companies, Rx and D.

"This is a collaborative effort on behalf of the health-care community in Brant. And the number 1 priority here is patient safety," said Tom Smiley of Dell Pharmacy. "Seniors make up 12 percent of the population but take about 40 percent of all prescribed medications, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that they are at the highest risk for medication issues such as side effects and not taking medication as intended."

"We want to make sure seniors get the right medication and are taking their medication properly."

Seamless care is all about making sure everyone involved in a patient's health care is on the same page. So when a patient leaves the hospital, and goes home or to another health care institution, everyone involved in the person's care knows what medication the patient is getting, Smiley said.

Ideally, health care professionals would like to have medication reccords available electronically, said Smiley, who is a member of the board of directors of the Ontario Pharmacists' Association.

Efforts to create an electronic medication record that is accessible to all health care professionals is under way but hasn't yet been fully developed.

In the interim, the task force has created the safe medication record that seniors should carry with them at all time.

USED PROPERLY

"Drugs, medication, are one of the best therapeutic tools that we have available to us but only when they're used properly," Smiley said. "The safe medication record should include all medications, including herbals and vitamins - anything that has been purchased over the counter - and it needs to be kept up to date."

Although safe medication records are important for everyone, the task force is targeting seniors because, as a population, they are the largest consumers of medication, Smiley said

As well, when people age, their bodies become more sensitive to medications.

A 16-page pamphlet, entitled Knowledge is the Best Medicine, is also available. The pamphlet includes tips about how to handle medication and topics that patients should dicuss with a doctor or pharamcists.