Educating the caregiver and community pharmacist to facilitate provision of consistent compounded medications from the inpatient to ambulatory settings.

The purpose of this pharmaceutical-care project was to demonstrate that educating a patient's caregiver about extemporaneously compounded medications prior to the patient's discharge and verbally assisting the community pharmacist in the preparation of the compounds can reduce delays and avoid problems in filling these compounds. Two sets of patients and their caregivers were selected based on the patients' receiving compounded medication as inpatients. The first set of caregivers (prestudy) were contacted and surveyed about obtaining the patient's compounded medications after hospital discharge. The second set of caregivers (poststudy) were counseled and given written information about compounded medications by the compounding pharmacist prior to hospital discharge. Within a month after discharge, the caregivers were contacted and surveyed about their experience obtaining the compounded medication. The pre- and poststudy surveys revealed that 58% of the caregivers in the prestudy group reported delays or problems in getting the compounded medication filled, while only 15% of the caregivers in the poststudy group reported delays or problems. Only 25% of the caregivers in the prestudy had their compounded prescription prepared by an independent pharmacy or hospital-based pharmacy specializing in compounding. In the poststudy group, 61% of the caregivers had their compounded prescription prepared by an independent pharmacy or hospital-based pharmacy specializing in compounding. Educating the caregiver about the patient's compounded medication can siginificantly reduce problems and delays in filling these compounds after the patient is discharged. If the community pharmacy is provided with contact information from the hospital compounding pharmacy, the community pharmacist can acquire information about the patient's medication to assist in the compounding of a comparable product, thereby reducing problems and delays in filling these compounds.