Document Type

Article

Department

Biological and Biomedical Sciences; Paediatrics and Child Health

Abstract

Background: Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of Vancomycin (VCM) is required to prevent inappropriate dosage-associated bacterial resistance, therapeutic failure, and toxicities in pediatrics. Anecdotal experience and studies show that many healthcare institutions confront barriers while implementing TDM services, this study aimed to assess a pharmacist-directed VCM-TDM service for optimizing patient care in our institution.
Materials and methods: Patients aged 1 month-18 years who received intravenous VCM were included in this quasi-experimental study. The pre-implementation phase (March-June 2018) consisted of retrospective assessment of pediatric patients, the interventional phase (July 2018 to February 2020) included educational programs and the post-implementation phase (March-June 2020) evaluated the participants based on pharmacist-directed VCM-TDM services as a collaborative-practice model including clinical and inpatient pharmacists to provide 24/7 TDM services. Outcomes of the study included the mean difference in the number of optimal (i) prescribed initial VCM doses (primary) (ii) dosage adjustments and (iii) VCM-sampling time (secondary). After ethical approval, data were collected retrospectively.
Results: A hundred patients were there in each phase. The number of cases who were correctly prescribed initial VCM doses was significantly higher in the post-implementation phase, mean difference of 0.22, [95% CI (0.142-0.0.358), p < 0.0001]. Patients who had correct dosage adjustments in the post-implementation phase also had higher statistical significance, mean difference of 0.29, [95% CI (0.152-0.423), p < 0.05]. More correct practices of VCM-levels timing were observed in the post-implementation phase, mean difference of 0.15, [95% CI (- 0.053-0.264), p = 0.079].
Conclusion: This study showed the significant role of pharmacist-directed TDM services to optimize the correct prescribing of initial VCM doses and dose adjustments.

Comments

Pagination are not provided by the author/publisher

Publication (Name of Journal)

Journal of Pharmaceutical Policy and Practice

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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