Aging & Society: Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

As age increases pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics changes are evident. Our study looks at the potentially inappropriate medications in elderly patients admitted to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, South Australia during Sep 2015 to Sep 2016, who were over seventy-five years old and discharged with over five long-term medications. One thousand patients fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Each patient’s case notes were examined for comorbidities, reasons for admission, and the number of prescribed medications. The inappropriateness of prescriptions is assessed and compared using the two validated screening tools; the Beers criteria and Screening Tool of Older Persons’ Prescriptions and Screening Tool to Alert to Right Treatment. Currently we are on the final stage of data entry and have started analysing for the inappropriateness of prescribed medications for each patient using the two validated screening tools. Our future work continues on checking drug–drug interactions of prescribed medications of these patients using the validated drug interaction checker software Medicine–Complete Stockley for each patients. Overall, this study shows the safety of prescriptions of medications in the most vulnerable elderly patients for evidence-based recommendations of improved quality of life of these patients.