16 May 2008

A University of Sydney pharmacy student has won the Student category of the National Quality Use of Medicines (QUM) Awards 2008 for her Honours project The Importance of Weight for Calculating Doses of Renally Excreted Drugs, an important QUM issue.

The winner, Ms Lisa Kouladjian, who is now a Masters student in Pharmacy, completed the work at the Clinical Pharmacology Department of the Royal North Shore Hospital. There were also two Highly Commended students, Ms Wern Jing Ding and Mr Ian Coombes, both from the University of Queensland (UQ).

Winners across the awarded categories – media and the sub-category of trade media; student, health organisation, community and poster – were announced at the National Medicines Symposium 2008 dinner in Canberra last night. Senator the Hon Jan McLucas, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Health and Ageing, presented the Awards.

The National QUM Awards are an initiative of the National Prescribing Service Limited (NPS) and the Pharmaceutical Health And Rational use of Medicines (PHARM) Committee to recognise the QUM achievements of a variety of programs and activities.

Ms Kouladjian’s project aimed to increase the frequency of weighing patients in two acute hospital wards. Where the patients’ weight information isn’t readily available, it may be estimated. An inaccurate estimate may result in either not enough or too much (subtherapeutic or toxic doses) of some drugs.

Patients using certain medicines where the dosing is dependent on body weight that are not weighed can experience more adverse drug events. The project considered two drugs, enoxaparin and the antibiotic gentamicin, for which the prescriber needs to know the patients’ weight to calculate the effective and safe dose.

The successful evidence-based intervention enhanced awareness about weighing patients and the importance of weight in calculating the doses of these drugs and improved QUM in a hospital setting.

Highly commended student Ms Wern Jing Ding completed her project as a fourth-year UQ pharmacy student while on placement at GPpartners in Brisbane. The project investigated the extent and appropriateness of medication alteration, such as crushing tablets, in residential aged care facilities (RACFs). Though effective and safe administration of medications may be compromised by medication alteration, it is a common practice in RACFs worldwide.

After the study, GPpartners’ Aged Care Team made a “Medication alteration decision making flow chart”. Endorsed by local aged care panels, it was given to all RACFs in the Division.

The result of Mr Ian Coombes study into medical interns’ attitudes to safe medication practice prior to starting their first hospital position and after they had made prescribing errors was the development of a standard state wide medication chart and a safe medication practice tutorial program.

The medication chart was later adopted as the national in-patient medication chart and the safe medication practice tutorial program has been implemented for all clinical students at UQ. Mr Coombes completed the study as a PhD student at UQ.

QUM is one of the central objectives of Australia's National Medicines Policy. QUM means selecting management options wisely, choosing suitable medicines if a medicine is considered necessary, and using medicines safely and effectively. The definition of QUM applies equally to decisions about medicine use by individuals and decisions that affect the health of the population.

ENDS

National Prescribing Service Limited (NPS) is an independent, non-profit organisation for Quality Use of Medicines funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing.