Pharmacotherapeutic actions related to drug interaction alerts - a questionnaire study among Swedish hospital interns and residents in family medicine.

Purpose: To explore how hospital interns and residents specialising in family medicine act on drug interaction alerts in a specific patient case, and on interaction alerts in general.

Methods: A 4-page questionnaire, including a fictional patient case (73-year-old woman; 10 drugs in the medication list triggering 11 drug interaction alerts) and questions regarding the use of interaction alerts in general, was distributed to interns and residents during educational sessions (November‒December 2023). The respondents were instructed to consider what actions they would take "a normal day at work" due to the risk of interactions between the patients' drugs.

Inter-rater agreement for detection of potentially inappropriate medication according to explicit and implicit STOPP criteria.

The Screening Tool of Older Person's Prescriptions (STOPP) is used to detect potentially inappropriate medication. Version 2 includes 80 criteria, whereof two can be considered implicit as their detection primarily relies on the assessor's expertise: (A1) drugs without indication and (A2) drug treatment beyond recommended duration. To explore the inter-rater agreement for detection of explicit and implicit criteria, data on consecutive primary care patients from a previous study (n = 302, 65-99 years of age) were used, including independent assessments of the 78 explicit criteria (23 556 assessments) and the two implicit criteria (604 assessments) by two specialist physicians.

Enhancing therapeutic reasoning: key insights and recommendations for education in prescribing.

Background: Despite efforts to improve undergraduate clinical pharmacology & therapeutics (CPT) education, prescribing errors are still made regularly. To improve CPT education and daily prescribing, it is crucial to understand how therapeutic reasoning works. Therefore, the aim of this study was to gain insight into the therapeutic reasoning process.

Quantification of the prevalence of harms in healthcare related to drug treatment: reflections regarding the use of definitions developed for other settings to estimate the magnitude of the problem.

The prevalence of harms in healthcare related to drug treatment is often quantified using terms developed for pharmacovigilance and pharmaceutical care. In this overview, we guide through the definitions and the settings for which they were developed, with the underlying intention to facilitate the interpretation of hitherto available research intended to contribute information regarding the magnitude of the problem in healthcare and to provide guidance for future research. To start, the regulatory/academic definitions of an adverse drug reaction (ADR) and a drug-related problem (DRP) are considerably broader than a literal interpretation would suggest.

Benefits and risks of using laparoscopic ultrasonography versus intraoperative cholangiography during laparoscopic cholecystectomy for gallstone disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: Intraoperative laparoscopic ultrasonography (LUS) or intraoperative cholangiography (IOC) can be used for visualisation of the biliary tract during laparoscopic cholecystectomy. The aim of this systematic review was to compare use of LUS with IOC.

Methods: PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and Web of Science were searched (last update: April 2024).