Can a series of Postgraduate Year Pharmacist Training Courses Benefit Clinical Care Ability and Cost Avoidance?

10.6145/jme.202112_25(4).0005

Chi-Hui Lee；Hsiu-Ju Lin；Ya-Ti Su；Meng-Hsuan Kuo

postgraduate year two ； pharmacist ； intervention ； cost avoidance ； therapeutic drug monitoring

Journal of Medical Education

25卷4期（2021 / 12 / 01）

208 - 218

英文

Postgraduate year (PGY) pharmacy programs can help pharmacists learn various clinical skills. However, information on the effectiveness of such programs is limited. Purpose: To determine the effectiveness of a series of prescription interpretation courses taken by PGY2 pharmacists on different types of interventions and cost avoidance. Methods: An observational data review on interventions by PGY2 pharmacists was conducted. The PGY2 pharmacist records included outpatient, emergency, and inpatient prescriptions. The pre-and post-training data were collected within 6 and between 13-18 months after employing pharmacists, respectively, and analyzed for professional knowledge score, types of pharmacist recommendations, rate of acceptance by physicians, and cost avoidance. Results: The professional knowledge scores increased from 53 ± 16 to 81 ± 5 after training (P = 0.005). A total of 579 prescription interventions were documented for 10 PGY2 pharmacists. The number of PGY2 pharmacist prescription interventions before and after training was 13 ± 7 and 45 ± 26 (P = 0.007), respectively. After training, the number of therapeutic drug monitoring sessions increased from 0 to 22, and that of patient-specific medication treatments increased from 17 to 160 (P ＜ 0.0001). However, the acceptance rate of PGY2 interventions decreased from 87% to 79% (P = 0.047). The estimated cost avoidance of all interventions increased from NT$ 59,300 to 185,550. The average probability of harm of each PGY2 pharmacist intervention before and after training was 0.5. Conclusions: A series of education and training courses benefits PGY2 pharmacists for individualized patient treatment and treatment monitoring. Thus, PGY2 training could help medical teams reduce healthcare costs associated with clinical interventions.

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