All Posts Tagged With: "safe medication"
Safe Medication Principles
Safe medication practices promote patient safety, enhance the results of medication use and reduce liability loss. To achieve these goals, the following principles are offered to assist physicians to form effective therapeutic partnerships with their patients. The global intent of these principles is to identify and address actions that have been shown by experience and numerous studies to be associated with the decreased risk of undesired effects.
In an effective therapeutic partnership, the physician’s contribution is to prescribe the appropriate medication and to educate the patient about its use. The patient’s contribution is to take medications according to instructions and to re p o rt back to the physician both the positive and negative effects. (Pharmacists and nurses also have an important role in the therapeutic partnership. The focus of these principles, however, is on the relationship between the knowledgeable physician and the informed patient.)
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The Cost of Safe Medication Use
Have you ever received a hospital bill and wondered why the medications you were given during your stay seemed to cost more than the same medications purchased from your community pharmacy?
There are many reasons for that. First, patients who are treated in hospitals tend to be sicker, often requiring expensive and intensive therapy for critical conditions.
The medications you receive in a hospital are also accompanied by a heavy dose of round-the-clock expert care. A dedicated team of physicians and pharmacists continually monitors and adjusts your medications to help you get better.
This close attention to how your body reacts to all the medications you are receiving is an important part of hospital care. The prescription drug warfarin is an example of the importance of monitoring. Although this is an inexpensive blood thinner, hospital patients who take warfarin daily must be monitored by a pharmacist to make sure that their blood doesn’t get too thin. Likewise, nonprescription medicines like aspirin can cause real problems when paired with other medications while you are hospitalized.
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U.S. Senate vote deferred on drug importation measure
A U.S. senator on Monday said he dropped plans to try to add a measure allowing importation of lower-priced medicines from other countries to tobacco legislation after being told the Senate will consider the drug issue separately.
Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan said that Majority Leader Harry Reid had promised to bring the drug importation measure to a Senate vote “very soon.” Dorgan said he expected the vote to happen within “a matter of a couple weeks.”
Last week, Dorgan said he planned to offer the importation measure as an amendment to a pending bill that would grant the Food and Drug Administration power to regulate cigarettes.
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Are generic drugs a bad bargain? - Safe Meds
Just when Beth Hubbard should have been feeling great, her health fell apart.
A 34-year-old housewares designer in the St. Louis area, Hubbard had recently gotten married. She liked the creativity of her career. And she’d conquered her mild depression and fatigue with a combination of exercise, rest and medicine, including the antidepressant Wellbutrin XL. But in the fall of 2006, shortly after she refilled her prescription — her pharmacy giving her this time Budeprion XL, a generic version of the drug — her good health gave way.
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Trade in illegal medicine exposed
An undercover investigation by the BBC found illegal pharmaceutical drugs being sold by dealers in Kent.
The British Medical Association (BMA) said it was a crime that also robbed people of the chance to be diagnosed.
It is thought that more than two million people in the UK buy medicines over the internet, many of which are counterfeit, substandard or unapproved.
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Roche’s Avastin helps slow breast cancer in study
* 45 pct progression-free survival benefit over Xeloda
* 55 pct PFS benefit over infused chemotherapies
By Bill Berkrot
NEW YORK, May 14 (Reuters) - Avastin when added to oral or infused chemotherapies significantly increased the time patients with advanced breast cancer live without the disease worsening, according to data from a late-stage clinical study.
Swiss drugmaker Roche Holding AG (ROG.VX ), which gained full rights to Avastin with its acquisition of Genentech, said in November that the drug had met the main goal of the study.
Detailed results from the 1,237-patient Ribbon-1 study, which was required following conditional U.S. approval of Avastin for use in breast cancer, will be presented June 1 at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Orlando, Florida.
ASCO released summaries of hundreds of cancer studies on Thursday ahead of its scientific meeting.
In one arm of the trial, patients who received Avastin and the oral chemotherapy Xeloda saw a 45 percent improvement in progression-free survival compared with those who got Xeloda alone.
The median time without the disease advancing — or the point at which half the patients had cancer progression — was 8.6 months in the Avastin group compared with 5.7 months with Xeloda alone, researchers said.
In the other arm, patients who got Avastin combined with standard infused chemotherapy — taxane or anthracycline — had a 55 percent increase in time they lived without the disease worsening compared with chemotherapy alone.
In this case the median time without disease progressing was 9.2 months with Avastin versus 8.0 months without.
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