Polypharmacy In Older Adults

Introduction When dealing with polypharmacy in older adults, whether in a home healthcare, acute or assisted living setting, the nurse has a large role in helping to identify a problem. According to the Brown article “Nurses in particular play an important role in education, monitoring and advocating” for elderly patients with five or more prescriptions. They can help with strategies to fix or alleviate the stress of multiple prescriptions on the older population. Polypharmacy in older adults affects everything from the patients’ psychological to physiological well being and needs to be looked at through all aspects on the nurses part.

Literature Review Based on the literature in the Brown article, research has shown a higher level of medication

These reasons can range from multiple co-morbities, treating side effects of other medications, multiple physicians and pharmacy, and using OTC to treat ones self. In this article it stresses and shows how the body changing in older age such as the decreased renal function can increase drug toxicity. While decline in short-term memory can result in “decreased ability to remember details of symptom onset, duration and treatment.” This becomes increasingly important for the nurse to understand because the elderly population process drugs differently as well as experience side effects differently than other

Nurses need teach their patients about the multiple medications usage. Also they will be there to advocate for those same patients when the medication list is getting to large. Nurses have that special role to see the whole picture, multiple doctors and specialist, and help put it together for their patients. The nurse needs to understand all the tools at their disposal while understand physiological changes that could be affecting the patient symptoms. Specific suggestions for education include nurses using the tools that Brown mentions. These tools have come out to help older adults and healthcare team to decrease polypharmacy across the board. The Beers list which includes prescriptions, OTC and herbals that may not be necessary for older adults. START (Screening Tool to Alert Doctors to the Right Treatment) allows doctors to develop a complete, safe, and effective course of medication therapy for older adults (Brown, 2016). Along with those STOPP (Screening Tool for Older Persons’ Potentially Inappropriate Prescriptions) is used and organized by the body system. (Brown, 2016). These tools used together can help elderly patients avoid taking unnecessary medications but also help them get on the right regime to live with quality of life