Community Care and Pharmaceutical Care: Focusing on Cheonan and Jeonju

Abstract

As our society enters an aging society, community care is emerging to enable the elderly to spend the rest of their lives in their own neighborhoods. This is a case study of pharmacists who provided home-based pharmaceutical services as part of the leading community care programs in Jeonju and Cheonan city. By interviewing pharmacists who provided home-based pharmaceutical services, we identified the status of pharmaceutical services in community care based on their experiences. Cheonan city has provided pharmaceutical services for poly-pharmacy users, visiting them three to four times a year, and most of the initial recipients have been retained. Jeonju city has provided three types of pharmaceutical services: medication counseling, medication counseling during the transition period after discharge, and medication counseling for diabetics. Both medication counseling and the discharge transition period service were provided twice per patient. The services provided were medication reorganization and medication counseling. The pharmacist thought that they had a better understanding of the senior and could focus on patient care. They had difficulty in preparing for the service in advance due to inadequate records of medication history, and medication reconciliation, and needed various contents to increase patient interest and pharmacist expertise. In order for the visiting pharmacy program to operate more effectively in community care in the future, it is necessary to increase the effectiveness of visiting pharmacy program by establishing an information-sharing platform and developing and disseminating various visiting pharmacy program.