Clinical Role of Pharmacists, To Overcome Medication Errors Related to High Alert Medication, Which Needs High Care from Prescribing to Doses Administration to The Patients

This study gives brief scientific findings on high alert medications, that these types of medicines are very sensitive in sense of usage because of their low therapeutic windows (Zyoud et al., 2019), (Geeson et al., 2020), (Salman et al., 2020). Whether it is scientifically proved that if these medications are used in a little lower dose than their recommended doses, they can’t produce therapeutic effects. This scientific study has pursued the ‘Descriptive Study’ method and carried out at a tertiary care hospital in Karachi, through reviewing patient’s medication profiles of those patients which were admitted in different wards including general Pediatric ward, High Dependency Unit (HDU), ICU, total duration for this study was five months.

The study has proved, if the high medication medicine’s doses will increase even some instant from the recommended therapeutic doses, it will cause toxic effects, and they will have more chances to produce adverse drug events, and it will definitely be life-threatening to target patients. Also, it has been found that in Pakistani hospitals, these medications are being used in very critical areas of the hospital, like, ICUs, HDUs, CCUs, NICUs. So, it needs to each organization, especially all categories of hospitals either they contain primary, secondary, or tertiary care set-up, essentially, they take initiatives to aware their health care professionals including Physicians, Consultants, Pharmacists, Nursing staff, whoever are involved in prescribing, dispensing, and administering these drugs respectively to the patients to keep control for the harmful events.

Secondly, this study recognizing the clinical role of pharmacists inside the hospitals, it has studied many interventions harmful medications errors which are frequently prescribed on different events in studied hospitals. In this study, 200 patient profiles are evaluated in which 28 high alert medications being find prescribed. Though the study severely has found that in most cases of using the potassium chloride has also found, that was about 13.5%, which is ultimately a life-threatening event to patients under care.

Thirdly, the study has evaluated, other 15 types of medication errors in the prescribed area, which has seen in the Wrong drug prescriptions as 6%, low dose 9%, high dose 11%. Though 18% of patient's profiles have been observed in which therapeutic drug level was even not monitored, and 6% of wrong units has prescribed! For 10% route of administration hasn't been mentioned, 5% of the profiles in which the route of administration has to find wrongly prescribed. 7% of unnecessary medications, and 10% of those profiles in which high alert medications have to find prescribed with the wrong dilution!

 Further, evaluations have found out that improper quantity of Diluent in 5% of profiles prescribed and Duplication of drugs has to find in 3%, Wrong frequency, 5%, and the Wrong Rate of Administration 3%. But no evidence has reported at which level drugs have reached at the patient’s end. With all these findings the study strongly emphasizes that these errors can be controlled only with the effective role of pharmacists, who always intervene with these types of medication errors. So, this study proves the role of pharmacists for better usage of High Alert Medications. The study recommends this role of Pharmacists in hospitals especially in Pakistan where mostly High Alert Medication Care Centers are running without proper pharmacy set-up. This study is helpful for medical practitioners, hospital organizations in developing countries to know the importance of clinical pharmacists in the management of High Alert Medications.