Polypharmacy: What Healthcare Professionals Need to Know

1. What is Polypharmacy?

Health care professionals know polypharmacy exists but have little exposure to the definitions and underlying causes of harmful polypharmacy. This causes them to just go along with the multi-medication list, feeling powerless to assess appropriateness. This chapter aims to heighten understanding and awareness of the numerous factors that contribute to polypharmacy, some root causes of inadvertent medication harm, and open the discussion on the importance and value of proactively addressing polypharmacy. This chapter offers the overall health system view of polypharmacy.

2. Patient Factors in Polypharmacy

Part of learning to manage polypharmacy successfully is having the ability to assess whether the efficacy, side effects, and outcomes you are witnessing at any given time are indeed a result of the medication list before you (in the chart or provided by the patient). Learners in this chapter will explore the various possible medication use behaviors that commonly impact outcomes, including patient preferences, patient motivation, access to medication use support, cognitive status and health care literacy, alteration of dosage forms, alteration of dose timing, and instructions.

3. Medication Appropriateness Assessment

In this chapter, the learner will be presented with assessment techniques that health care professionals can and should be skilled at performing to manage polypharmacy. We will look at appropriate dose assessment for individual patients, assessment of efficacy, side effects, and the impact of the patient’s medication use experience. Although most health care providers have little control over recommending or prescribing medication, we all can help ensure appropriate monitoring is carried out as missed monitoring is a major cause of adverse drug events. This section will go over techniques aimed at improving health care professionals’ polypharmacy management skills.