Shannon Olsen

Professor Goran

Integrating Experience III

19 October 2023

Let’s Talk Medications

I attended the “Let’s Talk Medications!” online event. I chose this event because pharmacology interests me and I feel like any updated information on medications, or new insights on medications will help me provide better care for my future patients. This event helped me build on my prior knowledge of medications and the importance of medication reconciliation. The number of adults taking more than 5 medications is becoming our new normal. A concept that was talked about in this lecture was the term polypharmacy and inappropriate polypharmacy. Polypharmacy is defined as any person who is prescribed or takes five or more medications. Regarding assisted living settings, patients are reported to taking 7 medications or more, and in long-term care settings 40 % of residents are reported taking 9 or more medications. Inappropriate polypharmacy is a term described as multiple medications that are increasing the risk of harm on the patient more than it is providing them benefits for their health. is greater than the benefit sometimes. Additional problems related to drug therapy include the fact that there is less than 2% of doctor’s geriatric trained, which is important for this population’s medication reconciliation. These statistics from the zoom event surprised me, as I did not realize how big of an issue polypharmacy is in today’s world. Having long medication lists can pose a lot of problems for patients especially older adults with a slower metabolism and weaker organ functions. Drug interactions between these long lists of medications is also overlooked by healthcare members that can cause severe side effects for the patients. In our breakout groups for a discussion activity, it was pointed out that a lot of patients are unaware of why they are taking certain medications which comes from a lack of medication education. There are many issues that can occur regarding polypharmacy such as adverse side effects, negative drug interactions, unnecessary costs, lack of medication adherence, and or overall health risks from the knowledge deficit in the medications patients are prescribed. I will incorporate this new knowledge in my future nursing practice by understanding that there are prescription mistakes, unnecessary medications on patient lists, how important it is to give medication education, and the importance behind doing medication reconciliation.