Role of the hospital pharmacist in an Italian antimicrobial stewardship programme.

Unlabelled: The inappropriate use of antimicrobial agents is contributing to an increasing phenomenon of bacterial resistance. For this reason, there is a growing interest in 'antimicrobial stewardship', a series of coordinated and multidisciplinary interventions aimed to promote the safe and appropriate use of antimicrobials in which the pharmacist's contribution is necessary for the optimal choice of drug, dose, duration of therapy and the implementation of cost containment strategies.

Aim Of The Study: We wanted to create a reference model and a specific training manual on antibiotic stewardship to introduce the role of the department pharmacist with specific infection disease skills in the Italian health system hospitals.

[Treating HIV disease: back to the patient?].

HIV disease has dramatically changed in the last two decades from a progressive, lethal disease to a chronic manageable condition. These changes are due to the availability of potent antiretroviral combination therapy, which also have the potential to contribute significantly to the control of the epidemic. Among persons living with HIV, incidence of immunosuppression-related opportunistic illnesses has clearly decreased, while an increase was observed in the prevalence of age-related noncommunicable comorbidities, including cardiovascular, metabolic, renal, bone and hepatic disease, due to chronic inflammatory state and to an overall aging of the population of persons with HIV.

Defining innovations of therapeutic interventions: a position paper by the Italian Society of Hospital Pharmacists.

Defining innovation in pharmacotherapy is complex because general definitions cannot be easily adapted to the specificity of different therapeutic areas. The Italian Society of Hospital Pharmacists has developed a position paper in which three criteria are used to recognise innovation to a new intervention: (1) clinical relevance of the trial's primary end-point; (2) evidence of superiority; (3) use of an adequate comparator in the controlled trial. Clinically relevant end-points should appear in predetermined lists by therapeutic area managed by our society; likewise, the third criterion must be documented by an authoritative therapeutic guideline recognised to be still valid.