Curriculum to enhance pharmacotherapeutic knowledge in family medicine: interprofessional coteaching and web-based learning.

Problem Addressed: Prescribing is an essential skill for physicians. Despite the fact that prescribing habits are still developing in residency, formal pharmacotherapy curricula are not commonplace in postgraduate programs.

Objective Of Program: To teach first-year and second-year family medicine residents a systematic prescribing process using a medication prescribing framework, which could be replicated and distributed.

Association of ICU or hospital admission with unintentional discontinuation of medications for chronic diseases.

Context: Patients discharged from acute care hospitals may be at risk for unintentional discontinuation of medications prescribed for chronic diseases. The intensive care unit (ICU) may pose an even greater risk because of the focus on acute events and the presence of multiple transitions in care.

Objective: To evaluate rates of potentially unintentional discontinuation of medications following hospital or ICU admission.

Patient adherence to aromatase inhibitor treatment in the adjuvant setting.

Improvements in adjuvant systemic therapy and detection of early disease have resulted in a decline of breast cancer death rates across all patient age groups in Canada. Non-adherence to adjuvant hormonal therapy in the setting of early breast cancer may significantly affect patient outcome. Factors associated with medication adherence are complex and may be patient-related, therapy-related, and health care provider-related.

What do children know about medications? A review of the literature to guide clinical practice.

Objective: To guide physicians in their communications with children about medications.

Quality Of Evidence: PubMed, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library were searched from 1980 up to August 2009 for qualitative and quantitative research that investigated children's knowledge of and beliefs about medications (levels of evidence II and III). Findings presented relate to healthy children aged 6 to 12 years old unless stated otherwise.

Medication reconciliation during internal hospital transfer and impact of computerized prescriber order entry.

Background: Internal hospital transfer is a vulnerable time during which patients are at high risk of medication discrepancies that can result in clinically significant harm, medication errors, and adverse drug events.

Objective: To identify, characterize, and assess the clinical impact of unintentional medication discrepancies during internal hospital transfer and to investigate the influence of computerized prescriber order entry (CPOE) on medication discrepancies.

Methods: All patients transferred between 10 inpatient units at 2 tertiary care hospitals were prospectively assessed to identify discrepancies.