Drug-Related Problems and Pharmacist Intervention at a General Hospital in the Jazan Region, Saudi Arabia
RISK MANAGEMENT AND HEALTHCARE POLICY
Authors: Babelghaith, Salmeen D.; Wajid, Syed; Alrabiah, Ziyad; Othiq, Mohammed Abdu M.; Alghadeer, Sultan; Alhossan, Abdulaziz; Al-Arifi, Mohamed; Attafi, Ibraheem M.
Abstract
Objective: This study examined the incidence of drug-related problems (DRPs) in different inpatient departments along with the medical team response to pharmacist's action in addressing DRPs at Jazan Hospital, Saudi Arabia. Patients and Methods: This retrospective study was conducted among inpatients at Ministry of Health hospital in Jazan, a region in southwestern Saudi Arabia. We collected data for a 2-year period (from 2016 to 2017). For any detected DRP of the ordered medications for dispensing, the inpatient pharmacist is sending report for that particular DRP with recommendation to the medical team which in turn might accept or reject such recommendation. Serious drug-drug interactions, as part of DRP, were assessed by utilizing three different online DDI checkers, including Lexi-Comp, Medscape, and Drugs.com . Results: The most common type of DRP was serious drug-drug interactions (49%). Over the study period, most incidences of DRPs were decreased. Of the DRPs in 2016 and 2017, antibiotics were the most commonly involved (51% and 69.5%) of cases, respectively, followed by proton pump inhibitors (25.3% and 14.1%) and statins (12.9% and 9.4%). Interestingly, of the 241 interventions for DRPs in 2016, 199 (82.5%) were accepted, resulting in a change in drug therapy (p=0.006). In 2017, 90 (70.3%) interventions out of 128 were accepted by the physician and the drug therapy changed (p=0.029). Conclusion: Pharmacist interventions appear to decrease the incidence of DRPs, which emphasize the importance of an optimal pharmaceutical care plan for clinical care settings.
A Joint CoMP C-NOMA for Enhanced Cellular System Performance
IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS
Authors: Elhattab, Mohamed Kadry; Arfaoui, Mohamed Amine; Assi, Chadi
Abstract
The inter-cell interference (ICI) and the intra-user interference in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) cellular networks have serious impacts on the performance of cell edge users. In this letter, we investigate the integration of coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission and cooperative NOMA (C-NOMA) aiming to improve the performance of cell edge users. Using this framework, we exploit the cooperation between base stations (BSs) to mitigate the ICI and the successive decoding of users that are near the BSs to further enhance the performance of cell edge users. In this setting, we derive a closed form expression for the outage probability of a cell edge user along with an analytical expression for its ergodic rate. We validate the derived expressions through various Monte-Carlo simulations, where we show the superiority of the proposed framework compared with other multiple access schemes proposed in the literature.