Health literacy among consumers in community pharmacy: perceptions of pharmacy staff.

Background: Low health literacy has important consequences for health status, medication adherence and use of health services. There is little insight from the perspective of pharmacy staff into how they identify the information needs of consumers and particularly the signals and risk factors of limited health literacy that they encounter in their day-to-day communication with consumers.

Objective: To investigate factors impacting on consumer health literacy, from the perspective of pharmacy staff.

Quality, safety and efficacy in the 'off-label' use of medicines.

Suitable dosage forms are not always available for specific patient populations and must be extemporaneously compounded. Extemporaneous preparation is the manipulation of drugs and excipients for a particular patient using traditional compounding techniques; these are referred to as 'off-label' and 'unlicensed' medicines. Off-label use can include altered doses, dosage forms or indications for use.

Aseptic Compounding in New Zealand and the use of Still Air Boxes.

Toward the end of the 1980s the care of terminally ill patients in New Zealand moved from state-owned hospitals into community hospice settings. As a result, repsonsibility for the management of medicines for patients receiving palliative care also transferred to the comunity hospice environment. To meet the requirements of palliative care patients and to facilitate the compounding of sterile preparations, community pharmacists began to compound certain aseptic preparations with a Still Air Box, a unique apparatus that is an alternative to the more expensive and bulky laminar airflow cabinets.

Variations in small-volume doses of a liquid antibiotic using two paediatric administration devices.

Objective: Children can be a difficult population in which to administer medicines and many parents or caregivers may be inexperienced in the administration of paediatric medicines. The aim of this study was to determine the variations in volumes of doses of reconstituted antibiotic suspension using two calibrated administrative devices.

Setting: Measurements were conducted in a Dispensing Laboratory in New Zealand, using locally available commercial, standardized measuring devices.