Inpatient Counselling
The Step-by-Step Approach of Inpatient Medication Counselling
It is very important for pharmacist to know the appropriate steps of inpatient medication counselling. This is to ensure that the patient understands about the way on how to take their drugs in a proper way thus improving the therapeutic outcome. When doing medication counselling, pharmacist must know about the patient ’s demographic data and background as well as the patient’s health status. These information is vital to make sure that pharmacist can prepare all the information that must be delivered to the patient during the counselling session. Pharmacist should be able to improve the patient ’s compliance on the medications that they are taking through the concept of adherence to the drug therapy.
The first step of the inpatient medication counselling is to plan, prepare and decide on what kind of approach to be used as well as what type of information to be delivered to the patient during the counselling session. It is very important for the pharmacists to prioritize the information so that the pharmacist will know what points to be emphasized. Pharmacist must be able to gather all the important information to be delivered to patients such as the dose that the patient should take, the expected benefit from the medications, the side effects that the patient might possibly get from the medication as well as the drug-drug and drug – food interactions.
The next step of inpatient medication counselling is the preparation step. In this step, the pharmacist must study about the patient’s background thoroughly before giving the counselling session to the patient. The pharmacist must read on the patient ’s demographic data, medication history and the other related information. The most important thing in this step is to plan the individualized patient therapy. The drug therapy plan for each patient is different. Therefore, it is very important to individualize the drug therapy plan for each patient. The pharmacists must also prepare the counselling tools that can be used during the counselling session such as device, charts and others.
The last step of is the most vital step that is to conduct the counselling session. The purpose of the counselling session is to counsel the patient on how to take the drugs in a proper way thus improving the therapeutic outcome of the patient. Pharmacists must emphasize on the important points during the counselling session as it is very difficult for the patients to remember all the information that has been told to them. Show and tell technique can be done at this step whereby pharmacists can ask the patient to explain back all the important information that has been told to them. This is important to ensure that the patient understands about ways on how to take the medications appropriately.