Category: News

As has occurred in other health care areas (i.e., medicine and nursing), a group of clinical and social pharmacy practice journal editors gathered in Granada, Spain to discuss how journals could contribute to strengthening pharmacy practice as a discipline. The result of that meeting was compiled in these Granada Statements, which comprise 18 recommendations gathered into six topics: the appropriate use of terminology, impactful abstracts, the required peer reviews, journal scattering, more effective and wiser use of journal and article performance metrics, and authors’ selection of the most appropriate pharmacy practice journal to submit their work.

Take a look at this recent online publication that provides updated evidence on epidemiological and social aspects of pregnancy in adolescence and systematically evaluates the effect of educational approaches to reduce related outcomes: http://www.cipf-es.org/book-pregnancy/

If you want to learn more about Health Economic Evaluations, take a look at this fresh new book chapter that provides an overview of the important concepts in pharmacoeconomic analysis methods, including studies classification, types of costs and outcomes, modeling approaches, and new trending analysis. Link: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50247-8_130-1

The lack of commonly agreed terminology in pharmacy field is highly prevalent and may have influence on the relevance and robustness of the area, especially how others see pharmacy literature. Potential consequences of this poor perception of pharmacy field by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) could be the omission of several pharmacy-related Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) or the low indexing rate of pharmacy practice journals in MEDLINE. Journal name abbreviation, under the responsibility of the NLM, is the unambiguous way to identify a journal in bibliographic references and catalogs. The present study investigated the consistency of pharmacy journal abbreviations in the NLM Catalog. For the 290 journals containing any word with the root pharm in their names, a consistent procedure for NLM title abbreviations was found for 27 of the words in journal names but not for the abbreviation “Pharm”, which represented several words with very different meanings: pharmaceutical, pharmaceutics, pharmacists, and pharmacy. The use by the NLM of different abbreviation for pharmaceutical and pharmaceutics would increase journal identification clarity.

Publication: DOI: 10.1016/j.sapharm.2022.01.003

Check further information on: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35027305/

Take a look at this fresh online publication that provides a basic framework for understanding major concepts and methods on evidence-based practice and Health Technology Assessment: http://www.cipf-es.org/book-hta/

A recent article implemented and evaluated different models including artificial neural networks (ANN), decision trees (DT), partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), and K nearest neighbour algorithm (KNN)  to  predict COVID-19′ positivity and severity based on patients’ laboratory tests results. Take a look on the results in Comput Biol Med 2021 May 29;134:104531.

Continuous quality improvement is a management process aiming that systematically evaluating the organization’s work process. In community pharmacy, this management can lead to reduction in medication errors and quality-related events.  This recent article published in J Am Pharm Assoc comprehensively describes this process in the United States.

This recent article provides a broad overview of the main concepts of pharmacoeconomics and discuss the case of economic evaluations for pharmacist-led interventions.  Full access: Pharm Pract (Granada). 2021 Jan-Mar; 19(1): 2302.

Defined daily doses (DDD) are broadly used for drug utilization studies. However, discrepancies between prescribed daily doses (PDD) and this metric may lead to bias conclusions. This article approaches a more dynamic system, based on national and annually updated DDDs. Br J Clin Pharmacol, 2021

Hospital-in-home is an innovative model that provides hospital-level care in a patient’s home. Pharmacists may contribute to this model trough medication reconciliation and medication optimization. In this article, authors performed a prospective quality improvement study to integrate clinical pharmacist into hospital-in-home models: J Am Pharm Assoc (2003). 2021 Feb 4;S1544-3191(21).