Abstract
Objective: We aimed to know the expectations of a pediatric intensive care unit staff for the activities to be undertaken by the clinical pharmacist, in order to plan her work along with the multidisciplinary team. Study design: A cross-sectional study, involving the multidisciplinary team of the pediatric intensive care unit of a tertiary-care university hospital. Method: A self-completion questionnaire containing questions regarding expectations of the pediatric intensive care unit staff for the role of the clinical pharmacist in the multidisciplinary team was applied to the team members, using a Likert-type scale response. Results: The nursing assistants/technicians and physiotherapists showed higher expectation for issues related to administration of medications; for nurses, the expectation for the clinical pharmacist performance focused on issues related to prescription drugs, such as evaluation of antibiotic therapy, while physicians considered most important information on drug therapy, as notification of allergies related to drugs, information on period of validity of medicines and evaluation of drug administration by gastric or enteral tubes. Conclusions: Team expectations varied according to the needs and routine of each professional category. The results of this study have contributed to implementation of the clinical pharmacy service in a Brazilian pediatric intensive care unit
Highlights
Teamwork as a strategy to cope with the intense process of specialization in health care has been shown as an alternative that may contribute to patient safety and efficacy of pharmacotherapy.[2,5]
The correspondence of a professional category with the questionnaire responses is represented by the distance on the graph
These differences in health care team expectations for the clinical pharmacist performance may be attributed to the specificities of function and routine of each professional category
Summary
Physicians are responsible for prescription, pharmacists for dispensing medications and nurses for administering them to the patient, and for a long time, these professionals have provided their assistance separately and not as a team. Clinical pharmacists work in collaboration with other health professionals, ensuring greater safety for the patient through exchange of information and knowledge.[6] In this context, the clinical pharmacist plays a key role in multidisciplinary teams of intensive care units, as patients’ clinical characteristics, complexity of medications and large daily variation of prescriptions demand a comprehensive pharmacotherapeutic assessment.[7,8,9,10]
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