High-Risk Medicines: Avoiding Common Interactions

Course Overview

Do you regularly prescribe or administer medicines? If so, you must continually be on high alert for potential or actual medicine interactions. Start this Course now to review why drug interactions occur, especially those involving high-risk medicines and how we can prevent them.

Topics

• What is a drug interaction?
• What are the consequences of harmful drug interactions?
• Which medicines should you always be on high-alert for?
• Practical strategies on how to monitor for and prevent interactions and unwanted effects, and much, much more...

Need

Harm to patients from medicines remains an ever-present risk. Approximately 250,000 Australians are admitted to hospital each year as a result of medicine-related problems.

Untoward effects relating to medications are a sentinel event. As health professionals are at the forefront of prescribing and administration they need to be eternally vigilant in their practice to stop unnecessary and preventable medicine interactions. Ongoing education about high-risk medicines and common pitfalls is essential for all health professionals.

Purpose

The purpose of this course is to draw the attention of registered nurses and other health professionals to regular medicines that are high-risk for interactions and prevent harm to patients.

Learning Outcomes

• Use in-depth knowledge of the difference between pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic drug interactions to support best-practice and reduce the likelihood of unwanted effects from medicines.
• A person in your care, who manifests signs and symptoms of an adverse drug reaction due to a drug interaction will be rapidly identified, assessed and appropriate treatment initiated.
• People in your care will receive correct evidence-based education about the purpose of their pharmacological treatment and risks associated with certain medicines.

Target Audience

Registered nurses and other health professionals will gain confidence from undertaking this Course, given the potential for harm associated with medicines.

Disclosure

No conflict of interest exists for anyone in the position to control content for this activity. Wherever possible, generic or non-proprietary names of medications or products have been used.

Educator

Louis Roller

Louis Roller has been an academic at the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences Monash University for 56 years. He was on the Pharmacy Board of Victoria for 22 years and has significantly contributed to many editions of various pharmaceutical compendia, including the Therapeutic Guidelines. He has been and is on the editorial board of the Australian Pharmaceutical Formulary and Handbook and has contributed significantly to all three editions of Mosby’s Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing and Allied Health Sciences. He is the author of hundreds of scientific and professional articles and has a passion for evidence-based knowledge and writes articles on disease state management. He lectures to pharmacists, medical practitioners, nurses, podiatrists and optometrists on a variety of therapeutic topics, as well as the University of the Third Age on various medication-related issues. He still lectures to pharmacy undergraduates on a number of topics. He has particular interests in drug interactions and pharmacogenomics and William Shakespeare. He has served as a committee member of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, Victorian Branch since 2008. In 2012, he was made a life member of the Australasian Pharmaceutical Sciences Association and, in 2014, he was awarded the life-long achievement award of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia. His current activities include singing in a choir, visiting schools about bullying (Courage to Care), and giving talks to U3A groups and appropriate aged-care accommodation groups. He is a proud member of the Australian Skeptics. See Educator Profile