Clinical practice and teaching of pharmaceutical care procedures for obstetric diseases

OBJECTIVES: Our goal was to explore the pharmaceutical service and teaching methods of obstetric clinical pharmacists to establish standardised pharmaceutical care procedures for obstetric diseases. METHODS: According to the evidence-based medicine method, the “Standard of Pharmaceutical Care” was established to standardise the procedure and content of the pharmaceutical care procedure including preface, purpose, scope of application, responsibilities, procedures, references, and appendix, with seven parts in total. The object of the pharmaceutical care procedure was selected by the harmfulness of the disease and the drugs used. The clinical pharmacists in obstetrics formulated the pharmaceutical care procedure for each disease according to the standard and carried out clinical practice and teaching. A retrospective study was conducted to investigate the impact of the pharmaceutical care procedure before and after its implementation on both clinical practice and training. Obstetric pharmaceutical consultation and adverse reaction were the key indicators for clinical practice. The graduation assessment for students was strictly carried out in accordance with the regulations of the Chinese Hospital Association Pharmaceutical Affairs Professional Committee including communication and consultation capacity interview, case assessment, and training procedure assessment. RESULTS: We established the standards for the pharmaceutical care procedures for three diseases: pregnancy with diabetes; pregnancy with thyroid disease; and pregnancy with hypertensive disorder. The clinical pharmacist conducted the pharmaceutical care procedure, participated in drug treatment management, and improved the recognition of the role of clinical pharmacists by the obstetric clinicians, often inviting the clinical pharmacists to participate in the consultations. The clinical pharmacists discovered and addressed any adverse reactions in a timely manner through patient drug education, subsequently reducing the underreporting of adverse reactions and improving the patient's medication compliance, which aimed to improve the medical quality of patients in our hospital. Second, the use of the pharmaceutical care procedure as a teaching tool helped to train students to grasp the key points of drug treatment and care of the disease and improve the students' scores in the graduation assessment (P<0.05). CONCLUSIONS: As a pharmacy service and teaching method that can be promoted and implemented, the pharmaceutical care procedure is beneficial for clinical pharmacists to carry out in-depth pharmaceutical services and can also be used as a teaching tool for clinical pharmacist training.