Anyone in a hospital that has successfully implemented this type of pharmacy service? Or failed to implement?
How did you incorporate it into your work flow and how receptive has management and nursing been towards it?
I worked at a hospital as an intern that did this. Granted, it was not a 'usual case' scenario, the hospital had 50 beds, and only did a couple discharges per day. How it worked was the tech would either give a printout of all the medications to the patient to be discharged's nurse , or to the patient themselves, and let them know to think up any questions ahead of time if they had any (to save some time), and then the pharmacist would come in and see the patient for 5-10 minutes right before they were going to walk out the door. If an intern was available, this was always the intern's job, but it seemed like the pharmacists didnt have too much trouble fitting it into their workflow (the pharmacy staff consisted of a director and a hybrid clinical/dispensing staff member).
Education wasnt extensive, it just consisted of running down the med list, giving only *key* points about each drug (indication, maybe 1-2 side effects, instructions about whether to take with food or not), with time spent going over the patient's individual issues with their therapy as needed (most patients didnt have extensive questions, but occasionally we'd get someone who was overmedicated for pain or sedation, or was experiencing intolerable side effects that warranted a talk with the discharging hospitalist about changing something).
Pretty laid back. It worked pretty well, primarily because of the slow workflow at such a small pharmacy and an excellent relationship between the hospitalists and the pharmacy staff (they would leave it up to us to make therapeutic changes as needed without any arguments). So i'm not sure if it would apply to other institutions, but it can work well if you make time for it.
