Exploring primary health care professionals’ queries to a drug information centre – a descriptive analysis

Naldy Parodi López, Daniel Pouragheli, Julia Izsak, Hanna Colldén, Daina Lasaitiene, Wenhao Wu, Carina Tukukino

Keywords: primary health care, drug prescribing, drug information centre

Background:

Drug treatment is one of the most common interventions in health care, implying challenging decisions through the process of diagnostics and prescribing to dispensing and administration of medications. Guiding information related to different steps of drug intervention processes are not always easily available. In Sweden, health care professionals can pose drug–related queries to one of seven drug information centres. Extent of, and type of, queries posed by primary health care professionals (PHCP) has not previously been explored.

Research questions:

To what extent do queries received to a drug information centre originate from PHCP and what kind of queries are posed from this level of care?

Method:

In this descriptive study, queries posed during 2022 to the drug information centre in Region Västra Götaland, Sweden, were extracted and analysed.

Results:

Out of 618 queries posed to the drug information centre in 2022, 104 (17%) originated from PHCP (physicians: n=99, 95%; nurses: n=3, 3%; and pharmacists: n=2, 2%). The most common queries from PHCP concerned adverse drug reactions (n=31, 30%), pharmacotherapy (n=22, 21%), prescribing issues including medicine shortages (n=20, 19%), pharmaceutical issues (n=15, 14%), drugs in pregnancy/lactation (n=7, 7%), drug interactions (n=7, 7%), and pharmacokinetics (n=2, 2%). A total of 183 drugs were involved in queries from PHCP. The drugs most often appearing in queries regarding adverse drug reactions (n=69, 38%) encompassed the cardiovascular system (n=21, 11%) including antihypertensive drugs (n=13, 7%: amlodipine, candesartan, felodipine, irbesartan, lercanidipine, n=2 each, 1%; bendroflumethiazide, bisoprolol, enalapril, n=1 each, 0,5%); and hypolipidaemic drugs (n=8, 4%: rosuvastatin, n=4, 2%; atorvastatin, evolocumab, ezetimibe, simvastatin, n=1 each, 0,5%).

Conclusions:

One out of six queries to the drug information centre originates from PHCP and one third of them concerns adverse drug reactions, mostly cardiovascular drugs that are commonly prescribed in primary health care.

Points for discussion:

Adverse drug reactions in primary health care

Report of adverse drug reactions

Role of drug information centres

#25