CPF FUNDED GRANT DETAILS

The US Pharmacopoeia supports the rights of children to receive developmentally appropriate medication information. In the clinic setting, children are rarely engaged in discussions of substance with healthcare professionals about their medications, thus, pharmacists are well-positioned to fulfill the Institute of Medicines recommendation to more actively involve children in such discussions. Engaging children in substantive discussions about their medications is important since studies have shown that directly communicating with children can improve their medication adherence, disease self-management, and clinical outcomes. Although children are frequent users of prescriptions, little is known about how often they receive developmentally-appropriate counseling and related services at community pharmacies. Specifically, there is a paucity of research documenting childrens educational preferences and engagement in medication therapy management in the community pharmacy setting, research in rural pharmacies is even more notably absent from the literature. In order to address these knowledge gaps, our proposed study objectives are to: a. determine the prevalence of pediatric patients interactions with community pharmacists in one rural and one urban community pharmacy, b. identify pediatric patient, caregiver, and pharmacist-reported barriers and facilitators to engaging pediatric patients in medication therapy management in pharmacies,c. describe pediatric patient and caregiver preferences for receiving medication education in community pharmacies, including identifying the educational methods such as videos, 1-to-1 counseling with the pharmacist, websites, written materials that are most feasible for delivering education. Successful completion of this study will provide necessary data to inform a proposal to PCORI for an intervention trial that would empirically evaluate the effectiveness of the identified interventions in improving quality of medication use in pediatric patients.