Signature Assignment EBP Structural Draft – Polypharmacy Management in Older Adults

  Signature Assignment EBP Structural Draft – Polypharmacy Management in Older Adults

Polypharmacy Management in Older Adults

 Introduction

Polypharmacy, the simultaneous taking of five or more drugs, is a health risk for those who are elderly. Even though medications are the cornerstone in treating most chronic illnesses, taking them increases the risk of developing adverse drug reactions, causing cognitive impairment and reduced quality of life (Alamer, 2024). To avoid such risks, managing polypharmacy should be the duty of structured interventions, including medication reviews and enhanced patient-provider communication (Keller et al., 2024). Given that the world population of older persons is rapidly expanding, solving this problem was inevitable in order to improve the quality of care for the elderly population (Cheng et al., 2023).

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Problem Statement

Polypharmacy has additionally increasingly become rife among aging individuals, affecting over 50% of older Americans (Cheng et al., 2023). For this reason, it becomes a cause of adverse drug events, frequent hospitalization, and an increase in overall healthcare costs. These outcomes point to the acute need for therapies that will improve the lives of elderly persons. However, the study reports indicate that structured polypharmacy management, including medication reviews and patient education, seems to have possibilities of decreasing such dangers despite the existing conventional care practices (Cheng et al., 2023). This research evaluates whether such structured interventions are more effective in reducing ADEs and enhancing the quality of life of older people than standard care.

Etiology of the Problem

The single term polypharmacy is attributed to various causes such as multimorbidity, the nature of the healthcare delivery systems, and the patient’s pattern. Modern elderly patients are the target population with multiple chronic diseases and medications in different categories prescribed by different doctors (Alamer, 2024). These prescriptions are often paradoxical or overlapping; the fragmentation of the treatment process causes this. Besides, prejudices that social and cultural norms promote medications rather than lifestyle changes contribute to the problem (Keller et al., 2024). Predictably, patients prefer to take prescribed drugs to supplement the recommended healthy diets and exercise regimes, leading to more medication dependence. One of the main challenges that makes management efforts worse is the availability of medications through several sources, such as online pharmaceutical stores (Cheng et al., 2023).

PICO (T) Question

P (Population): Older adults

I (Intervention): Structured polypharmacy management interventions

C (Comparison): Standard care without specific polypharmacy interventions

O (Outcome): Reduced adverse drug events and improved quality of life

T (Time): Over a 6-month intervention period

  

References

Alamer, A. S. (2024). Behavior Change Theories and Models Within Health Belief Model Research: A Five-Decade Holistic Bibliometric Analysis. Cureus, 16(6). https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.63143

Keller, M. S., Qureshi, N., Mays, A. M., Sarkisian, C. A., & Pevnick, J. M. (2024). Cumulative update of a systematic overview evaluating interventions addressing polypharmacy. JAMA Network Open, 7(1), e2350963. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.50963

Cheng, C., Yu, H., & Wang, Q. (2023, January). Nurses’ experiences concerning older adults with polypharmacy: a meta-synthesis of qualitative findings. In Healthcare (Vol. 11, No. 3, p. 334). MDPI. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11030334