Pharmacist-patient communication amid COVID-19 pandemic: A review of available options and potential impact

Chia Siang Kow,Syed Shahzad Hasan

doi:10.5920/bjpharm.836

Abstract

Communication plays a vital role to ensure the safe and effective use of medicines. Nevertheless, movement restriction measures and social distancing policies amid the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic may have introduced a significant communication barrier between pharmacists and patients. As such, there is an urgent need for alternative approaches to continue pharmacist-patient communication for pharmaceutical care activities. This narrative review summarized the use of five alternative approaches to replace traditional face-to-face counselling by pharmacists: &nbsp;telephone counselling, videoconference, multimedia-mediated counselling, provision of reading materials, and drug reminder packaging. These five approaches may be used interchangeably on their own or as a model of care where different aspects of each approach may be combined to deliver coherent pharmaceutical care.

Highlights

Since the first discovery of its outbreak in late 2019 at Wuhan, China, there have been more than 160 million individuals worldwide infected with novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), with the global death toll reaching over 3.3 million as of 13th May 2021 (Dong et al, 2020)
In order to rapidly and effectively contain the transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, which is the causative pathogen for COVID-19, governments around the world have imposed lockdowns or curfews, with stringent restrictions on people's movement to slow the spread of COVID-19 (Ghosal et al, 2020)
We aimed to summarise proven alternative approaches to direct face-to-face patient communication where pharmacists can adopt amid the COVID-19 pandemic and assess the pros and cons to which these approaches can be adopted in routine pharmacy practice at the ambulatory settings or community settings (Table 1)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Since the first discovery of its outbreak in late 2019 at Wuhan, China, there have been more than 160 million individuals worldwide infected with novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), with the global death toll reaching over 3.3 million as of 13th May 2021 (Dong et al, 2020). It is best to reserve multimedia counselling for patients who have had previous counselling by a pharmacist and need reinforcement (study by Moore et al (2015) showed that patients with prior warfarin use benefited significantly) or for patients who are highly motivated without previous history of nonadherence, since pharmacists’ follow up to ensure understanding and adherence may be required to improve long term clinical outcomes. It could be customised according to patients’ needs, for instance, the bigger font size for patients with visual problems or prepare in languages where the individual patients can comprehend

LIMITATIONS

Findings

CONCLUSIONS