Abstract
Background: A 2016 meta-analysis of pharmaceutical care for patients with diabetes mellitus showed that the following four components were most effective: (a) individual goal setting, (b) sending feedback to the physician, (c) reviewing the medication, and (d) reviewing blood glucose measurements. Methods: To formulate a hypothesis regarding the effect of these four pharmaceutical care components on glycemic control in patients with diabetes mellitus and the feasibility of these components in practice. Ten patients with type 2 diabetes were included in the case series and received medication therapy management over four months. Results: The four care components were feasible in everyday practice and could be implemented within one patient visit. The average visits were 49 and 28 min at the beginning and end of the study, respectively. The glycated hemoglobin values did not change over the study period, though the fasting blood glucose decreased from 142 to 120 mg/dl, and the number of unsolved drug-related problems decreased from 6.9 to 1.9 per patient by the study end. Conclusions: This case series supports the hypothesis that community pharmacists can implement structured pharmaceutical care in everyday pharmacy practice for patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus.
Highlights
The global prevalence of diabetes has increased in recent decades
A 2016 meta-analysis of pharmaceutical care components provided by community pharmacists and their impact on glycemic control showed that some intervention components were more effective than others
The time of the visits varied from 14 to 60 min depending on the number of medications, the number of diseases, frequency of blood glucose measurements, and potential drug-related problems (DRP)
Summary
The global prevalence of diabetes has increased in recent decades. In 2017, 58 million people were living with diabetes in Europe [1,2,3]. Multiple randomized controlled trials (RCT) have shown that community pharmacists’ interventions can improve glycemic control in patients with diabetes mellitus [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. Improvements in glycemic control can reduce the risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases and the occurrence of acute and long-term diabetes complications, such as severe hypoglycemia and microalbuminuria [16,17]. Four of the 32 analyzed pharmaceutical care components for patients with diabetes mellitus proved remarkably useful. These were individual goal setting, sending feedback to the physician, reviewing the medication, and blood glucose measurements [18]. We selected the four most effective pharmaceutical care components due to the practicality of implementing these measures into community pharmacy practice and considering the time constraints in a community pharmacy setting
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