A Field Study: Partnering with Pharmacists to Develop a Tool for Evaluating Misuse of Over-the-Counter Medications among Older Adults in the Community Pharmacy

Abstract

Safe over the counter (OTC) medication use by older adults (OAs, aged 65+) is difficult to achieve because of age-related physiologic complexities, and millions of OAs in the US who are at risk of experiencing a major adverse drug event linked to an OTC medication. Our interdisciplinary team studies how we can improve OTC safety in OAs by developing human factors-based, community pharmacy interventions. Testing the effectiveness of our interventions on improving OTC safety necessitated the development of a framework that captures the ways OTC medication misuse can occur and designing and implementing a tool that can be used to evaluate for potential misuse, which can be used by researchers and healthcare professionals to understand misuse in OAs. This paper shares the results of our efforts and discusses the implications of our work for other HF practitioners that may be interested applying our approach to their research.