An evaluation of the usefulness and economic impact of delivering Medicine Use Reviews (MURs)
Introduction – What are MURs?
Community pharmacies provide several advance services to the public, one of the most popular of these services are Medicines Usage Review (MUR) (Youssef, 2010). According to the National Health Service Act 2013, there are four underlying purposes of the Medicine Use Review service. With the consent of patients, MURs aim to improve the patient’s knowledge and understanding of the medicines they take; identifying incompliance or ineffective use of drugs as well as side effects or drug interactions that may affect the patient’s overall health (Adam, Department of Health, and Department of Health, 2013). In addition, it aims to improve clinical and cost effectiveness of medicines prescribed and supplied to patients with the hope of reducing wastage and enabling patients to get the best and most effective results from their treatment (Adam, Department of Health, and Department of Health, 2013). For this research paper, I will be evaluating the effectiveness of Medicine Use Reviews and if they are having the intended effect on the patient. I will also be assessing the ethics and approach taken, with focus on the pressure on the community pharmacist, on conducting MURs. Moreover, I will be investigating the economic impact MURs have on the NHS and if this advanced service is cost effective to run on the NHS.
Who are Medicine Use Reviews aimed at?
Medicine
Byerly, W. (2009). Working with the institutional review board. American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy: AJHP: Official Journal Of The American Society Of Health System Pharmacists, 66(2), 176-184. Retrieved from http://library.kaplan.edu/content.php?pid=150035
During my assessment I used the “Seven principles of good prescribing” to aid my decision making (National Prescribing Centre (NPC) 1999). This structured framework allows the prescriber to assess all appropriate factors and problems and make an informed decision whether to issue a prescription or discuss other options with the patient Humphries (2002). Examples of these options would be offering advice about their condition/problem or informing them that the treatment/items they require would be cheaper over the counter, thus making optimum use of the NHS budget, Prescription Pricing Authority (PPA) (2003).
In the UK, there are more than 1 billion scripts prescribed and dispensed every year (HSCIC, 2013). There are over 12,000 pharmacies in the UK, and approximately 1.6 million people visit a pharmacy every day (HSCIC, 2013). It is therefore natural to assume that between these 1 billion prescriptions, an error or mistake will be made. Current studies suggest that of all the dispensed medicines, there are approximately 0.01-3.32% errors made in community pharmacy and 0.02-2.7% in hospital pharmacy (James et all, 2009).
Assisting – At the request of the service user, opening bottles and packets; removing lids; popping pills out of packages when the service user cannot physically do this and has asked the care worker to help with that specific medicine; shaking bottles.
M1 – discuss organisational policies and procedures are by influenced legislation and guidelines with regard to the administration of medication
1. In the workplace there is a generic Medication Management Policy and Procedures for Adult Services (Issue 10, 2012) document. This is kept to hand in a locked cupboard, readily available to read. It requires that all Healthcare Staff are given mandatory training and refreshers are provided. Legislation which surrounds the administration of medication includes The Medicines Act 1968, The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, The Data Protection Act 1998, The Care Standards Act 2000 and The Health and Social Care Act 2001
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How many U.S. families are in thousands of dollars of debt due to the outrageous costs of healthcare? People are steering clear of medical attention that they know they need because they want to avoid this debt that they will inevitably get into. There is a solution for these people that need relief from their physical and financial problems. Socialized medicine is a system in which the government owns and regulates all aspects of the healthcare industry, which gives the common people a chance to get the medical attention they need.
Therefore the annual interest rate is 8% and the effective annual rate compounded quarterly is 8.24%
Prescribing in Australia is authorised by individual state and territory legislations that deal with drugs and poisons. These legislations allow various levels of health professionals to administer/supply medications under an assortment of protocols or direct order agreements. Any prescriber must also follow processes that have been determined by their professional bodies, which is legally binding in Australia. Legally, prescribers must also maintain all confidentiality and privacy clauses. Also, the patient’s health and wellbeing should be the focus of all decision making so that no-harm should come to the patient. The knowledge and skills obtained from the required training should be used to optimise patient’s health.
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Over the past couple of decades, a sudden change has started to take over the way business is done. The time when no rules applied, and anyone could do what they pleased at the cost of others or the environment is rapidly ending. Instead, companies today have become aware that it is essential for them to employ ethics and morality in their actions, if not they will be heavily scrutinized and rejected by the public. This way of thinking also applies to the pharmaceutical industry, which over the past century has been rapidly expanding. Do to the fact that this industry can determine the health and lives of millions of people, it is imperative that this industry follow an ethical and moral path.
Some hospital trusts and health authorities consistently outperform others on different dimensions of performance. Why? There is some evidence that “management matters”, as well as the combined efforts of individual clinicians and teams. However, studies that have been conducted on the link between the organisation
With the high cost of health care today, health insurance continuation is an important consideration for many unemployed individuals, job changers, dependents of covered workers, and retirees who no longer receive employer-provided benefits. Despite several laws in effect that make it possible to extend employer-provided health insurance, some workers continue to experience "job lock." This is a situation where workers, particularly those with pre-existing health conditions, feel that they must remain in a particular job for fear of losing their health insurance coverage. Many
This research was performed in order to investigate the processes relating to the post discharge MUR and NMS service and to ascertain if they were believed to impact on the patients’ health outcome. It was carried out using questionnaires, distributed by hand to community pharmacists in three boroughs of South West London. The aim of the questionnaire was to achieve a rapid response from a diverse range of community pharmacies. This study had a response rate of 50% (59 out 118 questionnaires were received back) which was lower than originally expected. It would appear that one of the main reasons could be attributed to time restraints of the role as many pharmacists identified that they did not have the time to complete the questionnaire. To further compound the lower than expected completion rate, some of the pharmacists approached were locum pharmacists who were reluctant to participate on the basis of their limited knowledge of the way that particular pharmacy functioned and their lack of familiarity with the community surrounding the pharmacy in which they were working. Another factor which contributed to the low response rate was that some of the returned questionnaires were not fully completed and therefore could not be included in the data analysis.