Telepharmacy during sars-cov-2

Background and importance With the arrival of the global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, hospital pharmacy services (HPS) have had to adapt to emerging needs One of these measures has been the sending of medicines to vulnerable patients who, due to their pathologies, are discouraged from attending the hospital Aim and objectives To analyse shipments and to evaluate the degree of patient satisfaction Material and methods A retrospective study of shipments made between March and June 2020 in the outpatient department (OPD) of a tertiary hospital was conducted Data were collected from the Farmatools drug dispensing programme and the citation lists of Jara Asistencial The selected patients were those who were cited at the OPD, who did not have a face-to-face appointment with the doctor and accepted the referral To measure the degree of user satisfaction, anonymous telephone surveys were made and evaluated by assigning a score from 0 to 10 The questions included aspects related to the attention received, schedule, information on the medication and overall satisfaction A free field for suggestions for improvement was also included A satisfied patient was defined as one whose global score was higher than 9 Results Of all the patients cited between March and June 2020 (2178 patients) by the HPS, 1284 (60%) were candidates for referral Of the selected patients, 53% were finally sent the medication 54% were from towns near Badajoz and the rest were from the capital city Mean age was 53 5 years and 51 5% were women The pathologies with the highest percentage of referrals with respect to the total number of patients registered in the OPD were: 83% primary biliary cirrhosis (5/6), 76% primary hyperparathyroidism (25/33), 73% inhibitors of PCSK9 (24/33) and 72% idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (18/25) A total of 128 (64%) surveys were completed out of the 200 calls made The average value of the responses obtained was higher than 9 Regarding the suggestions section, all survey respondents except one agreed to resume the medication delivery service Conclusion and relevance Telepharmacy was a useful tool for the provision of pharmaceutical care, with a high acceptance rate by patients It would be necessary to evaluate the inclusion of this service within the HPS