Tweede uitgifte begeleiding: Nuttig voor patiënt? Een onderzoek in Nederland

In community pharmacies, second drug delivery contacts are a challenge to provide pharmaceutical care. Patients who receive a prescribed drug for the second time, have already experienced any drug effects and side-effects. These patients may have additional informational needs, compared to first prescription contacts. Community pharmacies may put attention on these drug delivery contacts, by asking patients about their drug experiences during these first weeks. This seems not to be common practise, only a minority of the Dutch community pharmacies seem to provide this pharmaceutical care at the counter. We investigated the experiences of a sample of these innovative pharmacies. In total 45 community pharmacies who were practising this pharmacy service were asked to participate in the study, of which 33 agreed to participate (respons 73%). The pharmacists and one of the pharmacy technicians were interviewed about the procedures and experiences, whereas they were also requested to register patients' reports about their drug experiences in these second drug delivery contacts. The pharmacists and technicians reported to focus on second drug delivery contacts about drugs which are intended for chronic use, exspecially asthma/COPD and antidiabetics. In introducing this new activitity in the pharmacy, problems were met in the field of time-management, expertise and computerfacilities. On the other hand, they used the computersystem for the instructions (protocol) and to register the patient contacts. The analysis of 232 observations of these contacts revealed that in 28% of these contacts patients reported drug problems. The majority of these problems concerned drug side-effects. We conclude that second prescription drug contact in pharmacies, may be viewed as an excellent opportunity to improve patient compliance with drug therapy.