Browsing by Subject "lääkehoidon järkeistäminen"

Population is aging. Within aging the morbidity and the use of medicines increase. Polypharmacy and the physiologic changes related to the ageing expose to medication-related problems. This has to be taken into consideration when planning the care of the elderly. Multiprofessional cooperation is seen as a solution to optimize the medicines' use among the aged people. Finnish Medicines Agency (Fimea) has started a network with local multiprofessional health care teams. The aim of the network is to make a national guideline for multiprofessional cooperation and optimizing the medicines' use among the aged people. The objective of the study was to clarify multiprofessional working models to optimize the medicines' use that had been carried out or planned by the teams belonging to the network. The models can work as examples when creating standardized practices to multiprofessional cooperation in Finland. Factors that promote or prevent multiprofessional cooperation and the problems of optimizing the medicines' use were clarified as were the possible solutions to solve them. Factors to strengthen cooperation and its effects were clarified on the basis of experience of the multiprofessional teams. As a material of the study were the interviews (n=15) of health care professionals (n=55) invited to Fimea's multiprofessional network. Fimea had collected the material that consists of group discussions (n=10), pair interviews (n=3) and individual interviews (n=2). The interviews that had been recorded were transcribed and analyzed by using a combine of inductive and deductive content analysis. A theoretical framework in the study was multiprofessional teamwork and networking. According to the interviews, multiprofessional cooperation in optimizing the medicines' use among the aged has been carried out in Finland in both public and private health care. The interviewees think that the most important way to optimize the medicines' use is clear division of tasks and responsibilities. Adding more pharmacists to all over the public health services and fostering the role of the community pharmacies as a part of the health care are seen as solutions. Multiprofessional meetings and education can break barriers between different professionals. The most common problems are the challenges related to economic limitations and to the busy work. There are problems in IT systems and information transfer. At the individual level, the most common problems seem to be in communication and the attitudes. The interviewees' experience is that successful multiprofessional cooperation increases medication safety and improves patients' state. The work of all the professions is faciliatated and burden of the public health service decreases. Lighter medication reviews could be used to find the patients who benefit from the comprehensive medication review. Information transfer and the currency of patients' medication should be secured with functioning IT systems. The results of the study can be utilised when developing multiprofessional practices to optimize the medicines' use. More study is needed to show the profitability of medical reviews, dose dispensing and other services.