DRUGS AND THERAPEUTIC INFORMATION SERVICE PROVIDED BY CLINICAL PHARMACISTS FOR AN IMPROVED PATIENT CARE: AN EXPERIENCE FROM A TERTIARY CARE TEACHING HOSPITAL

Objective: To assess the quality of drug information (DI) services provided by clinical pharmacists in a South Indian tertiary care teaching hospital.Methods: All answered DI queries by the Department of Clinical Pharmacy are documented electronically. To assess the quality of DI services, aquality assessment panel was constituted comprising the senior clinical pharmacists, and a quality assessment checklist was developed and appliedfor assessing the quality of DI services.Results: During the 12-month study period, a total of 1204 DI queries were received. The majority (48.76%) of DI queries was received during wardrounds by the clinical pharmacists and among them 61% of the queries was for better patient care. The highest numbers of queries (48%) werereceived from post-graduate medical students followed by the physicians (16%) and interns (8%). The most common DI queries were requested toknow the dosage/administration (22%), followed by cancer chemotherapy dosing (15.70%), adverse drug reactions (8%), drug use in pregnancy/lactation (7.56%), and drug-drug interactions (6.48%). The highest number of queries were from Department of Medicine (26%) followed by SurgeryDepartment (19.35%), Department of Pediatrics (15.61%) and Department of Dermatology (8.47%). The majority of the queries were answeredimmediately (64%). As per the quality assessment checklist, 64.5% queries were rated as excellent in quality followed by good (35.8%) and only 3.5%DI queries were required improvement.Conclusion: The quality of DI service was found satisfactory based on the rating.Keywords: Drug Information, Quality Assurance, Clinical Pharmacists, Medicine InformationÂ