Short summary

Chronic patients in the Capital Region of Denmark, who does not have a prescription when they come to collect their medicine at the community pharmacy cannot get help from the doctor on duty, if it is in evenings or weekends where their general practitioner are closed. As a result, they may have to go without medicine until their general practitioner opens again. I want to find data on how big the problem with the missing prescriptions are at community pharmacies in Denmark and develop a quality assured process to help the chronic patients with missing prescriptions at the Region of the Capital. This project is my master thesis project. 

Rationale

In a Danish community pharmacy, it is common to see a patient with a chronic disorder who doesn't have a prescription online. The cause of the missing prescription could be: 1) if the prescription is out of date (it will only be online for 2 years), 2) if the patient has forgotten to get an appointment at the doctor to get a new prescription for the chronic medication or 3) if the general practitioner or maybe hospital doctor didn't put the prescription online.

The patient can get a new prescription by calling his/her general practitioner or the hospital. The problem for the community pharmacy is helping the patient when the prescription is missing in evenings and weekends where the general practitioner or hospitals outpatient clinic is closed. In the Capital region of Denmark the doctor on duty is called "1813" which is also the telephone number for this service. The doctors which are on duty at 1813 are not allowed to prescribe chronic medicine for patients. Chronic patients who doesn't have a prescription by Friday afternoon, may have to go without their medication until Monday where the general practitioner opens again.

My master thesis will be divided into three sections. First, I will have to collect data from the Danish community pharmacies to see how often they have a patient without prescription, what the causes are and if they can get a new prescription from their general practitioner. Second, I will have to work on a solution. Which in this case is a quality assured process on how the pharmacist should handle the case where a chronic patient doesn't have a prescription on his/her chronic medication. Third and last, I would like to do a pilot test on the process at Sønderbro Pharmacy in Copenhagen. This community pharmacy is open 24-7 until 1^st of January and have opening hours from 6 am to 12 midnight, so the staff is more likely to have the chronic patients without prescription when the doctor isn't open. 

Description of the cohort

The Danish Pharmaceutical network is a network where other pharmacist can ask community pharmacist to help them collect data for a project. The project has to be approved by the persons in charge of the network. I will use pharmacists in this network to collect data to my master thesis. Hopefully there will be a lot of pharmacist who will be interested enough to contribute on the data collection at the community pharmacy where they work. The pharmacist has to motivate their colleagues to help collect data to.

The cohort will be recruited at the Danish community pharmacies when the pharmacist/pharmaconomist meet a chronic patient over the counter they can collect the data immediately in REDCap. The cohort will be patient in general who doesn't have a prescription for their medicine. In the questionnaire, I want to know if it is chronic medication, if they can get a new prescription and if they have more medicine at home.  This is just some of the data I want to collect from the cohort. 

Data and biological material

The data will be collected from the questions in the questionnaire. There will not be any personal data on the patients. I am only interested in the data regarding the missing prescription and how they can solve it and if the patient will be without medication because of it. 

Publications associated with the project