The Importance of Counseling

The Pharmacy Times recently posted an article concerning a $500,000 settlement with Walgreens regarding noncompliance with counseling laws in California. According to the lawsuit, pharmacists were not routinely counseling on new prescriptions or dose changes as mandated by law. Counseling is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of a pharmacist's career. It is our chance to use our clinical knowledge to educate our patients and make sure they fully understand how to appropriately take there medications. Counseling is where we can warn our patients about potentially dangerous adverse events of their medications so they can catch problems early on in their treatment. It also gives us another chance to look at the patient's prescription and catch any mistakes that may have inadvertently slipped through the verification process. It seems like common sense to mandate counseling on all new prescriptions. However, this is not the case. Many states only require an offer to counsel. In a world where we are all on-the-go and expect our prescriptions to be processed at the same speed with which we get our Big Macs, many people will simply turn down the offer for pharmacist counseling. "I've got places to be!" The sense of urgency is just as problematic on the pharmacy side of the equation. With the time crunches and quotas hanging over many pharmacists' heads, the sense of pressure can be indescribable. Especially in large, high-volume stores, breaking the workflow and taking time to counsel on every new prescription can seem like an inconvenience. After all, the patients often get handouts describing how to take their medications; they can just read over those at home, right? For those few monographs that escape their untimely fates in the trash cans just outside the doors of the pharmacy, let us consider the fact that the average adult in the United States has a 9th grade reading level (2). Health literacy is an enormous issue in our country, and we cannot rely on patient comprehension of monographs for proper drug education. As pharmacists, we need to ensure that we take those extra few minutes to thoroughly counsel our patients, and assess their understanding of how to use their medications. This is what we have undergone all of those rigorous years of schooling to do. You never know when your intervention will be the difference between high-quality healthcare and a fatal medication error.




Sources:
1. http://www.pharmacytimes.com/news/walgreens-settles-pharmacist-consultations-lawsuit
2. http://www.impact-information.com/impactinfo/literacy.htm