Children receiving a prescription medication should be counseled directly by a health care professional, recommends the Institute of Medicine and United States Pharmacopeia. But that’s not happening, according to a new study led by the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy.
Pharmacy researchers observed 97 families pick up 116 prescriptions for children at three community pharmacies over a two-week period. Two-thirds of the time, the child was not present when a parent or caregiver picked up the prescription. Pharmacists counseled the child’s caregiver 20 percent of the time but never counseled the children separately. Children and caregivers were counseled together twice. The findings were published in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association.
“Previous studies estimated that direct pharmacist-to-child communication occurs in about 30 percent of cases, but that research relied on self-reported survey data from pharmacists,” said Delesha Carpenter, Ph.D., M.S.P.H., lead author of the study and an assistant professor in the Division of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy. “During our observations, children never received individual counseling from the pharmacist, and that is a missed opportunity.”
Pharmacists should encourage parents to bring their children with them to the pharmacy, Carpenter said. Directly communicating with children about taking their medicines has been shown to improve their adherence to the medication regimen, improve their ability to manage their condition, improve health outcomes for the patient and may reduce medication errors, Carpenter said.
Carpenter and her collaborators at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy observed interactions between pharmacists and patients at a grocery chain pharmacy in rural western North Carolina and a grocery chain and an independent pharmacy in urban western Pennsylvania. Eighty percent of the medication pickups were observed in the urban pharmacies.
Children ranged in age from 7 to 17 with an average age of 12.5. Families with younger children were more likely to receive counseling than older children. Treatments for chronic conditions comprised 61 percent of the prescriptions with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression being the most common. Treatments for acute conditions were most likely to be antibiotics for infections or allergy medications.
The researchers found that only the child’s age significantly predicted whether the family would receive counseling. Pharmacy staff were more likely to interact with the families of older children.
Coauthors and Funding
In addition to Carpenter, the other authors of the paper are
- Olufunmilola Odukoya, Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy;
- Dayna Alexander, Dr.P.H., MS.P.H., postdoctoral fellow at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and
- Katherine Horowitz, a Doctor of Pharmacy student at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy.
This research was funded by a grant from the Community Pharmacy Foundation.