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Letter
The geriatric clinical pharmacist at the emergency department: a novel front-door transdisciplinary care model
  1. Tingting Selina Cheong1,
  2. Birong Zhu2,
  3. Edward Chong3
  1. 1 Pharmacy, Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Singapore
  2. 2 Nursing Service, Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Singapore
  3. 3 Geriatrics Medicine, Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Singapore
  1. Correspondence to Tingting Selina Cheong, Pharmacy, Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Singapore 308433, Singapore; selina_cheong{at}ttsh.com.sg

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We refer to our article entitled ‘Emergency Department Interventions for Frailty (EDIFY): front-door geriatric care can reduce acute admissions’, which reported a success rate of up to 81.4% in preventing acute hospital admissions in older adults, with no compromise in health outcomes such as rehospitalisation, institutionalisation and mortality.1 In this letter, we present our novel transdisciplinary care model, describing the unique role of the EDIFY pharmacist.

Front-loading geriatric assessments and interventions right from the emergency department (ED), to meet multidimensional needs of vulnerable older adults and to reduce adverse outcomes, have been coined as ‘front-door geriatrics’.2 At our centre, the EDIFY programme aims to minimise potentially avoidable acute admissions and deliver early integrated geriatric interventions at the ED. Team members consist of professionals trained in geriatric care, including a geriatrician, specialist registrar, geriatric advanced practice nurse (APN), board-certified geriatric pharmacist, and …

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Footnotes

  • Contributors All authors have contributed significantly to the manuscript (design and conduct of the service, data interpretation and analysis, writing and review of the manuscript).

  • Funding The original research study evaluating the EDIFY program was funded by the Ng Teng Fong Healthcare Innovation Programme (Project Code: NTF_JUL2017_I_C2_CQR_02), which had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

  • Competing interests None declared.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.