Written by Emma Wilson
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Medication reconciliation is commonly positioned at admission and discharge as a central defence against medication error during transitions of care. Its value is well established for reconstructing medication histories, identifying discrepancies, clarifying undocumented changes, and improving the accuracy of medication information transferred between settings. Yet clinically important pharmacotherapy risk is not generated only when medication lists disagree. Patients may reach hospital with uns
Written by Thomas Weber
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
A prescribed dose specifies the amount of drug administered, but it does not necessarily specify the exposure that a patient experiences. The distinction becomes clinically consequential when biological or treatment-related states change the processes connecting dose to systemic concentration. Inflammation can alter drug-metabolizing enzymes and transporters over time; kidney disease can modify active secretion as well as selected nonrenal pathways; hepatic dysfunction can affect metabolism, upt
Written by Sofia Papadopoulou
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Medication optimization in multimorbidity is frequently described as a search for inappropriate prescribing, unnecessary medicines, or opportunities for deprescribing. These approaches are valuable but incompletely represent a more difficult clinical problem: changing one component of a regimen can improve one therapeutic objective while worsening another. The competing consequences may involve disease control, adverse effects, drug interactions, prescribing cascades, functional reserve, treatme
Written by Carlos Mendoza
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Prescribing before diagnosis is settled is common in clinical medicine, but empirical treatment becomes difficult to interpret when the therapeutic objective, expected time course and exit conditions remain implicit. Diagnostic uncertainty is not itself an indication for treatment. A therapeutic trial is defensible only when exposure is clinically justified despite unresolved diagnosis, the treatment has a plausible relation to a defined target problem, and the clinician can specify what observa
Written by Mei Lin
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Medication-process deviations are frequently treated as interchangeable indicators of medication harm, although many never alter drug exposure and many exposure changes are detected or corrected before injury occurs. The clinically important question is therefore not simply whether an error occurred, but how a deviation interacts with the work system, the resulting exposure, patient susceptibility, detection timing, and remaining opportunities for recovery. This Current Opinion separates process
Written by Elena Petrova
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Pharmacist services are commonly evaluated using counts of interventions, recommendations, accepted recommendations, medication-related problems addressed, or other process measures. These indicators are important for describing workload, service reach, and implementation, but they occupy different positions in the causal sequence between pharmacist activity and patient benefit. A recommendation may never be accepted; an accepted recommendation may never be implemented; a medication modification
Written by Julia Berg
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Medication counseling is often judged by whether patients receive and understand correct information, yet sustained medication use requires more than accurate recall of instructions. A patient may understand what a medicine is for, how it should be taken, and what adverse effects require attention while still being unwilling or unable to incorporate the regimen into everyday life. This article examines why comprehension and readiness can diverge and identifies counseling domains that capture fea
Written by Peter Novak
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Pharmacy education routinely asks learners to become confident decision-makers, yet confidence alone provides little information about whether a decision is defensible. A learner may be confident and correct, confident and wrong, uncertain despite adequate competence, or appropriately hesitant because the available information is incomplete or the consequences of error are substantial. Educationally useful confidence therefore depends on calibration: the correspondence between a learner’s confid
Written by Lucas Meyer
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Designation as an essential medicine expresses a policy priority, yet it does not by itself establish that a patient can obtain an appropriate, quality-assured product when treatment is needed. Access emerges from several functions that operate under different institutional responsibilities and can fail independently or interact. Selection determines which medicines receive formal priority; financing and procurement determine whether that priority becomes a sustainable purchasing commitment; qua
Written by Priya Menon
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Conventional cost-effectiveness analysis identifies whether the incremental health generated by a medicine is sufficient relative to its incremental cost, but an average cost-effectiveness ratio does not identify how those health consequences are distributed. This methodological article develops an approach for making the distribution of recipient health, displaced health, financial-risk protection, and normative equity judgments explicit in medicines reimbursement. The analysis separates five i
Written by Sarah Bennett
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
The difference between treatment efficacy demonstrated under trial conditions and effectiveness realized in routine care is often described as an efficacy–effectiveness gap. That shorthand is useful but analytically incomplete. After prescribing, several distinct processes can alter whether an efficacious treatment becomes an effective real-world intervention: treatment may never be initiated; persistence may end early; implementation of the regimen may be irregular; clinically necessary monitor
Written by Omar Haddad
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Modified-release oral dosage forms are designed to control the timing, rate, or anatomical location of drug liberation, but control of release does not automatically confer equivalent control of systemic exposure. The relationship becomes conditional when formulation behavior interacts with food, gastrointestinal transit, luminal pH and fluid dynamics, regional absorptive capacity, dosage-form integrity, presystemic disposition, and patient-specific physiology. This Perspective examines those in
Written by Maria Lopez
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Targeted nanomedicine is often evaluated through evidence that a carrier reaches diseased tissue, accumulates within a lesion, or enters a target-cell population. These achievements are important, but each describes only one stage of a longer therapeutic problem. After lesion access, the carrier may acquire a different biological identity, enter the wrong cellular compartment, remain sequestered within endosomes or lysosomes, release its payload too early or too late, separate spatially from its
Written by Laura Fitzgerald
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Pharmacist-led medication optimization encompasses interventions that differ in review intensity, patient involvement, prescriber collaboration, follow-up, and continuity across care settings. Improvements in prescribing processes are frequently reported, but effects on medication-related harm, unscheduled healthcare use, readmission, and mortality are less consistent. Interpretation is further complicated when control groups receive overlapping medication-management activities and when successf
Written by Sofia Lindqvist
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Medication counseling can fail when information is linguistically inaccessible, exceeds patients’ literacy or information-processing capacity, conflicts with cultural or contextual expectations, or depends on digital resources that patients cannot readily use. Adaptations intended to address these barriers vary substantially in what they modify and in how their value is evaluated. To map strategies used from 2017 through 2024 to adapt medication counseling across language, literacy, cultural, an
Written by Michael Osei
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Medication-related risk after hospital discharge persists despite widespread use of medication reconciliation, pharmacist review, discharge counselling, electronic information transfer, and post-discharge follow-up. Their effects vary substantially across programmes and health systems, suggesting that intervention components alone do not explain whether transitional medication-safety work succeeds. This realist review examined how hospital-to-home programmes generate benefit, attenuation, or fai
Written by Peter Nagy
Published on Vol 3 Issue 2, 2023
Clinical-pharmacy interventions are frequently described as effective, yet the meaning of effectiveness changes substantially according to the outcome assessed. Improvements in medication appropriateness, adherence, prescribing quality, and medication-related problems may occur without corresponding reductions in hospital use, mortality, or deterioration in quality of life. Interpretation is further complicated when systematic reviews repeatedly include the same primary studies and are treated a
Established in 2019, Galaxy Publication stands as a global academic publishing house focused on advancing scholarly work across medicine, nursing, and health sciences. Through its network of peer-reviewed journals, the organization brings together original research and academic contributions from scholars around the world, creating a shared space for knowledge exchange and intellectual collaboration.
