Polypharmacy and Older People in the Hospital Environment

Abstract

Hospital pharmacists encounter polypharmacy increasingly frequently during a patient’s journey from admission to discharge. Many older adults take several medicines regularly for long-term conditions or disease prevention and, because the prescribing of medicines is the most common healthcare intervention in acute settings, a patient’s medication list will almost invariably be added to during a hospital episode.National guidelines have been written for the management of single-disease states (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, 2016), although the increase in co-morbidities with increasing age (Guthrie, Makubate, Hernandez-Santiago, & Dreischulte, 2015) provides the potential for polypharmacy to occur even when best practices are followed. This is compounded when separate clinicians prescribe for each co-morbidity, the patient attends different pharmacies for dispensed items, or the patient also purchases over-the-counter or -Internet medicines.