Background A geriatric population with a high degree of comorbidity is more exposed to medicines-related problems.

Purpose To evaluate the effect of a medicines revision group on medicines prescribing during the admission to a recently opened hospital in patients with a high degree of comorbidity.

Materials and methods The medicines revision group consists of a nurse, a doctor and a pharmacist. It meets once per week and analyses the medicines prescribed prior to admission and the recommendations at hospital discharge of patients with admission or discharge documentation.

Patients with a high degree of comorbidity are selected through the Charlson criteria >3.

STOPP-START criteria are applied to the medicines prior to admission and to the recommendations at the hospital discharge.

Medical prescriptions prior to admission are obtained from electronic prescriptions and the prescription at the hospital discharge is obtained from the discharge report.

Data were processed with SPSS. The null hypothesis is no differences between admission and discharge; a significance level p < 0.05 could reject this hypothesis.

Results 99 patients were evaluated with an average age of 82 years; 22 were excluded for having died and 4 due to a lack of data.

All 73 included patients had comorbidity >3, averaging 6.3 points on the Charlson criteria.

A total of 74 STOPP and 17 START criteria were found in prescriptions prior to admission. At the time of hospital discharge, prescriptions matched 46 STOPP and 26 START criteria.

Statistically significant differences were obtained in STOPP criteria (p = 0.00), but not in START criteria (p = 0.630).

Our results are comparable with those published to date, although most of them obtain significant differences in both START and STOPP criteria. A possible explanation could be the type of population studied which does not benefit from primary prevention medicines.

Conclusions The medicines revision group obtained significant improvements in medical prescriptions according to STOPP criteria.

No conflict of interest.