The year 2022 has been a challenging and, at times, breakthrough year for drugs in long-term care. Unfortunately, many of the people who managed and dispensed them in nursing homes were absent.
“Staffing shortages in skilled nursing homes do create medication management challenges,” said Chad Worz, PharmD, BCGP, chief executive of the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists.
The profession Worz represents has spent tireless hours learning about medications and their impact on the elderly and all their myriad health problems. In turn, pharmacists have become invaluable partners — part teacher, part scientist, part clinician, part efficiency expert — to a generation of nursing directors and medication techs.
“Further, pharmacists can step into some of the traditional roles nurses play in terms of performing assessments to monitor medications like AIMs testing for antipsychotics medications and other adverse drug reaction assessments that need to occur routinely,” Worz added.
Here’s a look at some of this year’s top medication management issues:
In April 2022, nursing homes got their first look at Paxlovid — the first oral medication authorized for the treatment of at-risk patients with COVID-19 and a new antiviral the medical community touted as a first-line COVID-19 treatment.
It remains one of the more stable and efficacious COVID-19 therapies to date. Even as COVID infections continued rising through the early months of 2022, health officials remained confident that Paxlovid was effective at tamping down hospitalizations. And seniors on common maintenance drugs were found to face fewer COVID risks, a NIH study found. Researchers also have found that many common drugs for treating diabetes and obesity were actually reducing COVID complications.
News on other kinds of medications, meanwhile, has been mixed. Research has begun to point to troubling new drug interactions, many of which involve long-standing medications with strong safety profiles.
On the brighter side, several medication management trends began to emerge around patient-driven efforts to reduce their overall number of prescription medications. One industry group even challenged clinicians and operators to get on board with a new deprescribing campaign that aims for a 25% medication reduction in long-stay residents.
From the October 2022 Issue of McKnight's Long-Term Care News
