Lane Cove Wellness Centre

Home medication reviews (HMRs) occur when your doctor requests our pharmacist to review all of the medication that you have stored in your medicine cabinet. A simple report from us back to your doctor(s) will line up the medical team and keep you healthy as a result.

Importance

Why are HMRs essential?

In 12 months of the 2016-17 period, 11 million hospital admissions occurred in Australia, according to an analysis cited on Pubmed. Of these, up to 10% were through adverse drug (medicine) reactions, mostly from mis-use of medications.

The average admission costs taxpayers $3,800. That means about $4 billion of your tax money is being spent on needless, largely avoidable hospital admissions.

How does it work?

Your doctor requests our pharmacist to do a HMR. We then come to your home, by appointment, and review your medicine cabinet, noting all meds including those purchased OTC, even from supermarkets. The pharmacist then returns to the pharmacy, write a report of findings with recommendations. We send this to the doctor, who may take up our recommendations.

Benefit to you

Accidental “Double dipping” of medicines can occur when, for example, different doctors prescribe different brands of the same drug, or completely different drugs that might have the same class of action. Additionally, you may have purchased medications from a supermarket or elsewhere. These accidents may cause unwanted illness and suffering to you – everything from falls, psychotic episodes to ulceration, mostly leading to hospital admissions.

It is good to be able to avoid these unnecessary and unhelpful episodes.

The commonly mis-prescribed drugs in this area include blood pressure-lowering, anti-cholesterol, and anti-depressant drugs. Other sources of this doubling-up effect can occur with analgesics and anti-inflammatory drugs that can be purchased OTC at chemists or supermarkets.

Sometimes you might even double up on your harmless vitamin supplements, creating imbalances  and unnecessary costs that are easily rectified. Rarely would the latter clash, however, with prescription-strength medication.

Clearly, Wades Wellness Pharmacy is ideally placed to deal with these anomalies, with our highly-trained team of pharmacists, pharmacist/naturopath Phil, and medical nutritionist Kirsty.

Frequency

This action is recommended annually, and often follows on from a much briefer Medication Review.