Do you know your medicines? If medicines aren’t used properly (or if the wrong ones are used together), the results can be serious. Each year more than 140 000 Australians are hospitalised with problems caused by their medicine- evidence shows up to 69% of these admissions can be avoided. Older people are particularly at risk. In response, the Pharmacy Guild of Australia has developed the Home Medicines Review (HMR) Program which the RACGP and Dept of Health and Ageing encourage on an annual
basis.
HMRs are particularly useful for people who:
- take more than five medicines a day
- have recently spent time in hospital
- are concerned about their medicines
- are confused about their medicines
- do not always remember to take their medicines
- whose main language at home is not English
- are using any asthma puffers
- are on blood thinners such as warfarin