Outpatient Care

When patients are in the hospital, they are treated for different ailments with different various medications. However, when they leave, but still need the medication, they are turned to ‘Outpatient Care.” Outpatient care means where treatment does not require an overnight stay at a hospital or facility. Pharmacies are one of the most common outpatient facilities, and are very abundant found in different retail drugstores such as CVS, Walgreens, Rite aid, and even independent pharmacies. The goal of these pharmacies, and the pharmacists who run them, is to ensure that the patient has a smooth transition to daily life, and receives their correct medication on time, with the least amount of hassle possible. Each service provider prides their respective companies on being able to handle medication orders from different facilities and are willing to do all that is possible to ensure the least amount of discrepancies that can arise possible. Researchers are always doing experiments to find the faults in certain lines of work, and in this certain study, they were looking for where the most amount of discrepancies …show more content…
As a pharmacist, they are expected to know drugs in depth, and be able to answer any questions that the patient may have about their medication. As stated in the abstract of the study, “Poorly executed transfers of older patients from hospitals to long-term care facilities carry the risk of fragmentation of care, poor clinical outcomes, inappropriate use of emergency department services, and hospital readmission. In this study, use of a pharmacist transition coordinator improved aspects of inappropriate use of medicines across health sectors.” This study, conducted by Maria Crotty and colleagues, showed that the use of pharmacists in the transitions of care is very beneficial, especially in the geriatric