Drug-food interactions in hospitalised patients. Methods of prevention.

Drug-food interactions in hospitalised patients may result in decreased drug efficacy or increased drug toxicity. The increasing complexity of drug therapy regimens has increased the potential for drug-food interactions to occur, reinforcing the need to develop methods to prevent clinically significant drug-food interactions. Before selecting the optimal method, in terms of feasibility of implementation and successful outcome, drugs with the potential for clinically significant interactions with food must be identified. From an analysis of the literature, 6 methods to prevent drug-food interactions have been suggested as useful tools. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages. Most have been developed in response to guidelines from the most well recognised agency for quality review in the US, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organisations (JCAHO). Based on those recommendations, an ideal programme to prevent drug-food interactions would be a combined patient counselling and label system to select the most appropriate drug administration times and increase nurse and patient awareness of the potential for drug-food interactions. However, because of time constraints and limited resources, a label system or the provision of a drug-food interaction pamphlet to the patient before discharge would be a more practical method. Newsletters and educational in-services combined with patient counselling or a label system would be a valuable method to prevent drug-food interactions in hospitalised patients.