Browsing by Author "Pakarinen, Tiina"

Clinical pharmacy is defined as a service which a pharmacist provides for example to a ward or a medical center. In Finland clinical pharmacy (or ward pharmacy) was started in the 1980s but it hasn't expanded widely until at the end of the 2010s. Need for cost-effectiveness research has been under discussion because of increasing health care costs. This kind of research helps to choose the most effective services. Naturally also clinical pharmacy is under effectiveness consideration. A systematic review was conducted considering the cost-effectiveness research of clinical pharmacy. The aim of this review was to find clinical pharmacy interventions which have been proven costeffective. Literature research found 7 articles. Three of these studied pharmacokinetic patient surveillance and in the rest four articles pharmacist worked as a part of multidisciplinary team. In six studies the cost savings were greater than the costs. The other part of this study was about clinical pharmacy in the hospital district of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS). Data was collected from Helsinki University Central Hospital (HUCH) wards which had had clinical pharmacy services during the years 2009-2012. Collected data included clinical pharmacy costs and amount of work gained with those costs, drug consumption, drug waste amounts, amounts of drugs returned to HUS-pharmacy and amounts of HaiPro-reports. Collected data was presented as a time series. The costs of clinical pharmacy had followed the trend of other health care costs during 2009-2012. Wards with clinical pharmacy had somewhat larger amount of drug waste than the other wards. Amounts of drugs returned to the pharmacy were greater in the wards with clinical pharmacy. The amount of HaiPro-reports grew by a factor of 15 from 2009 to 2012. Especially amounts of drug administration errors and errors in writing down prescriptions were greater in clinical pharmacy wards. The data in this thesis describes only a small part of clinical pharmacists' work in the HUCH area. Making final conclusions about the cost-effectiveness of clinical pharmacy isn't possible with this data. The systematic review can give ideas to improve clinical pharmacy in HUS in a more cost-effective direction.