[Medication screening by the community pharmacist in Belgium]. / Revue de la medication par le pharmacien d'officine en Belgique: pourquoi, comment et situation actuelle.

About 20% of the European population is older than 65 years. Because of multimorbidity (i.e. multiple chronic condition within a patient), older patients are often prescribed multiple drugs [i.e. polypharmacy). Both older age and polypharmacy significantly increase the risk for adverse drug events. International research showed that more or less 5% of all unplanned hospital admissions is related to the use of medication. About 70% of these drug related admissions happened in patients older than 65 years. Moreover, about half of the admissions could have been avoided. These preventable hospital admissions were caused by the intake of medication without an indication, problems with medication adherence, interactions and/or insufficient monitoring. We define this as (potential Drug Related Problems [DRPI. DRPs can occur on multiple occasions during the medication management process: prescribing, dispensing, intake and monitoring. When DRPs can be detected in an early stage, significant consequences can be avoided. To accomplish this, multiple strategies are possible. One of the possibilities is performing a periodic medication screening by the community pharmacist in patient groups at risk. During such a medication screening, the pharmacotherapy is critically evaluated in a systematic and structured way. The implementation of medication screening in first-line health care is currently limited. The community pharmacist is nevertheless ideally placed to perform this task. There is an important relation of trust between him and the patient and the community pharmacist has access to a full medication history. Furthermore, as an expert in drug-related issues, he possesses all necessary knowledge to perform the pharmacotherapeutic analysis.

[Reliability of OTC advertisement Relevance and quality of cited literature]. / Quelle est la fiabilité de la publiciteé pour les produits non soumis à prescription? Pertinence et qualité de la littérature mentionée.

Introduction Pharmacist receive a lot of publicity for OTC products. Often one or more literature references are mentioned to support the advertising claims. Objective In this study we examine: [1) whether the advertising claim is consistent with what is stated in the literature references mentioned on the leaflet and [2] whether these literature references are trustworthy. Method Through 60 randomly selected community pharmacies, pharmacist-directed advertisements for OTC products I= medicines, medical devices, dietary supplements and parapharmacy) with at least one bibliographic reference, were collected. The literature references listed in these leaflets were assessed in terms of content [= is the claim consistent with the information in the reference) and technically [= evaluation of the quality of the references]. Results The 85 collected OTC advertisements made 214 claims that referred to 243 references. Of these, 128 references did not support the promotional claim. The remaining 84 references did support the corresponding claim. From 31 references no full text was obtained. Of the 84 supporting references 44 were of dubious quality. The remaining 40 references were found to be reliable. Conclusion This study shows that the literature references in advertising leaflets for OTC-products are not a reliable source of information on the advertised product. Pharmacists should deal critically with this information and should be encouraged to consult reliable scientific sources.