Background Hospital pharmacists providing a clinical pharmacy service are well placed to apply the Screening Tool of Older Persons’ Prescriptions (STOPP) criteria to elderly inpatients to identify potentially inappropriate prescribing.

Purpose To incorporate the STOPP criteria into clinical pharmacy practice; to ascertain what proportion of clinical pharmacists’ recommendations based on the STOPP criteria were implemented in practice; and to explore doctors’ reasons for non-implementation.

Material and methods Pharmacists applied the entire STOPP criteria to a random selection of inpatients. On identification of (a) potentially inappropriate medicine (s) (PIM(s)), the pharmacist documented their recommendation (s) in the patient’s medical records and contacted the patient’s doctor. Follow up after 3–4 working days determined if the recommendations had been implemented. For recommendations not accepted, a semi-structured telephone interview was conducted with doctors to explore the reason (s) for non-implementation.

Results

• 140 patients were included in the study with a median age of 79 years. The median number of regular medicines prescribed was 8.

• Pharmacists identified 50 PIMs related to 44 patients; however, on review of the patient’s medical notes, pharmacists deemed 22 of these PIMs appropriate.

• Pharmacists made a written and verbal recommendation involving 28 STOPP PIMs in 25 patients (17.8%).

• Doctors implemented 16 (57%) out of 28 recommendations, 7 PIMs (25%) were not accepted and 5 PIMs (18%) were lost to follow up.

• 7 Doctors were contacted to participate in a semi-structured telephone interview in relation to 7 PIMs prescribed (All related to proton pump inhibitors).

• The average time taken to apply the STOPP criteria Was 9.97 min.

Conclusion Incorporation of the STOPP criteria into clinical pharmacy practice is an effective method of identifying PIMs in the elderly population. Doctors are receptive to clinical pharmacists’ interventions with the exception of proton pump inhibitors.

References and/or Acknowledgements No conflict of interest.