Empowering Healthcare: The Pharmacy's Vital Contribution

Empowering Healthcare The Pharmacy's Vital Contribution

Patient empowerment has become one of the most popular buzzwords in healthcare. Patients need timely, accurate information and a safe, easy way to see doctors and monitor chronic conditions.

Those needs can only be addressed by public health and pharmacy collaborating more closely. This collection examines how pharmacists can make important contributions in community health needs assessments, disease surveillance and monitoring of population health outcomes.

Patient Education and Counseling

Patient education and counseling are critical to helping patients understand their health conditions and how to best manage them. This includes teaching patients about their medications, their treatment plans, and any lifestyle changes that may be recommended by their healthcare providers. It also helps them feel more empowered by giving them the information they need to be successful in their treatment journey.

Patient empowerment has a number of positive effects on both patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs). Studies show that when patients are empowered, they are more likely to stick to their medication regimens, which in turn leads to better results. Additionally, when HCPs educate their patients on their health conditions, they are more likely to build a more collaborative doctor-patient relationship. This, in turn, increases patient adherence and retention rates.

In addition to providing education and counseling, pharmacists can also help their patients with the paperwork associated with their care. This may include navigating complex insurance forms, completing required tests, and filling out medication charts. This can be time consuming, but it is also an important part of a patient's healthcare journey.

Ultimately, patient education and counseling is essential to patient empowerment because it provides the tools, information, and environment necessary for patients to take on a larger role in their own healthcare. Often, it is skilled clinicians who are given the credit for reducing readmissions and lengths of stay in hospitals. However, many patients want to play this role, and with the right assets, they can improve outcomes. expressrx

HCPs can further help empower their patients by giving them access to their medical records through digital platforms like patient portals. For example, the OpenNotes initiative has shown a sixty percent improvement in adherence to medication schedules when patients are able to view their visit notes online. While some people argue that digital is not a prerequisite for patient empowerment, Dermot O’Riordan, a transplant recipient and rare disease patient, believes that it is going to be pretty tough to do patient empowerment “properly/completely” without it.

Ideally, the education and counseling that pharmacists provide should be documented in their patients' permanent medical records as consistent with their patient's care plan, the health system's policies and procedures, and applicable state and federal laws. This can be accomplished by utilizing standardized patient education and counseling guidelines from organizations such as ASHP, as well as by creating specific counseling records for each patient.

Preventive Care

Most healthcare improvement efforts are credited to clinical, operational or financial process changes by skilled clinicians in hospitals and clinics. While the contributions of these providers are certainly essential, patients must also play a vital role in addressing their own health needs and promoting better outcomes. It is often difficult to understand where to begin, however.

Empowering patients with accurate, timely and empowering information, as well as encouraging them to take an active role in their care is a start. This approach has been shown to reduce hospital readmission rates, and can provide cost savings for both patients and healthcare systems.

This can be done through a variety of avenues, including regular check-ups, screenings and educational classes and workshops offered by community centers and clinics. By fostering long-term relationships with healthcare professionals, individuals can develop trust and gain a comprehensive understanding of their medical history, which will allow them to make more informed treatment decisions and receive personalized guidance throughout the process.

Moreover, preventive care is an important component in achieving patient empowerment. Regular screenings and check-ups will allow healthcare professionals to identify potential issues at their earliest stages, when they are typically less invasive and costly than treating advanced or chronic conditions. These early detection efforts are especially important for individuals living in underserved communities, who may face barriers to accessing health services.

Finally, the background, training and culture of healthcare providers must be taken into account. These factors are directly positioned to nurture or impede the development of patient empowerment, and can influence the effectiveness of communication between a patient and provider, as well as their respective stances on shared decision-making, the ability to admit mistakes and the level of patient adherence to their treatment regimen.

While there is considerable overlap between patient enablement and empowerment, these concepts differ in the degree to which they entail an actual change in an individual’s behavior. Patient enablement focuses on the general acquisition of knowledge and skills, which can be achieved in a variety of ways, including through patient-provider interactions, educational classes and seeking relevant information online. On the other hand, patient empowerment requires a specific commitment to engaging in their healthcare and is defined as a patient’s willingness to be active in a collaborative relationship with their healthcare provider, despite their levels of uncertainty.

Community Health Needs Assessments

Community health needs assessments (CHNA) are a best practice within the field of public health that prompts communities to consider both local conditions and community assets. The assessment can be broad and encompass the entire community, or it can focus on a specific issue. CHNA can serve as a foundation for community-change work and inform the development of programs to address those issues.

Many healthcare organizations have a community health needs assessment department that focuses on creating and managing these assessments. These departments can also help identify the most critical healthcare needs in a given community and develop strategies to address them. They may also help identify the key drivers of those needs and determine the most effective interventions.

Empowerment and enablement are two different concepts, although they are often used interchangeably in healthcare. Patient empowerment is the ability of patients to assert greater control over decisions and actions that affect their health, while patient enablement is the acquisition of knowledge and skills to do so.

One of the most important things that healthcare institutions can do to empower patients is to make information available and accessible. This can be done through various means, including web-based tools that provide a variety of medical information to patients. It can also be done through peer-to-peer exchanges, consumer health devices and mobile apps.

While these are excellent first steps, it is essential to go beyond that and ensure patients have access to information that can help them make better choices about their health. This is why many unique programs exist that demonstrate the positive impact and time-saving potential of providing patients with timely, accurate information.

As part of their 2022 community health needs assessment process, Natchaug Hospital hosted a series of forums to gather input on a variety of topics. The reports that were generated from those meetings identified some of the priority areas for the community. Those priorities include addressing the social determinants of health, particularly in the areas of access to food and transportation. Other priorities include reducing health disparities and continuing to improve the community’s mental wellness.

Immunizations

Immunizations protect people against diseases caused by bacteria and viruses. Immunity to these diseases may occur naturally or be given through vaccination (vaccination). Vaccines contain either weakened live virus, specific proteins from the pathogen or combinations of sugar molecules and toxoid from the pathogen that elicit a strong immune response.

Vaccines have largely eradicated diseases such as smallpox, polio, diphtheria, measles, rubella and neonatal tetanus. Unfortunately, when vaccination rates drop due to myths and misinformation about vaccine safety, these diseases can quickly reappear and threaten infants, children and people with weak immune systems.

When a disease returns to communities, it can overwhelm hospitals and put everyone at risk. In addition, outbreaks can disproportionately affect vulnerable populations and create large economic costs for health care systems.

The most common vaccines for adults and children are tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, chickenpox and pneumococcal conjugate vaccinations. Immunizations can be provided in the community through pharmacies, clinics and hospitals.

Although some people who have received vaccines still get the disease that they are vaccinated against, this happens rarely. Vaccines are very safe, even for babies and very young children, and most people who have had vaccines do not suffer any serious side effects. In addition, when enough people in a community are immunized against the same disease, it becomes harder for the germs to spread from person to person and the whole community is less likely to get sick. This is known as herd immunity or community immunity.

In addition, vaccination is important for people who cannot be immunized, such as newborns, people with weakened immune systems and those who are allergic to components of vaccines. Some people can be immunized against diseases through fractional dose vaccination, which reduces the amount of the vaccine they receive, in exchange for a higher number of societal benefits.

Providing patients with the information they need to make informed decisions is key to empowering them, but this can only happen when patients have access to reliable sources of health data. Many unique programs have been developed to support patients as they become more active in their own health care. For example, research has shown that people with chronic disease spend over 5,000 hours each year making decisions about their health, beyond the time they spend with their doctors.