Whose Job Is It Anyway? Swedish General Practitioners’ Perception of Their Responsibility for the Patient’s Drug List
Ann Fam Med Rahmner et al.
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The Article in Brief
Whose Job Is It Anyway? Swedish General Practitioners’ Perception of Their Responsibility for the Patient's Drug List
Pia Bastholm Rahmner
, and colleagues
Background Information about a patient’s current drug list is one of the keys to safe drug prescribing. The aim of this study is to explore general practitioners’ perceptions of who is responsible for the patient’s drug list, so that drugs prescribed by different physicians don’t interact negatively or cause harm.
What This Study Found Interviews with 20 Swedish physicians reveal a variety of opinions about who is responsible for managing a patient’s drug list. The study finds 5 different strategies used by doctors to manage this responsibility: (1) imposed responsibility, (2) responsible for own prescriptions, (3) responsible for all drugs, (4) different but shared responsibility, and (5) patient responsible for transferring drug information.
Implications
- Technical solutions, like electronic health records, alone are unlikely to be sufficient for preventing drug errors.
- Doctors should be made aware of variations in understanding drug list responsibility so that health care quality can be improved.
